Villeneuve is for the most part scrupulously faithful to the source material, which makes his most significant departures interesting and worth lingering on. The biggest is to compress the story chronologically so that Paul’s sister Alia, conceived weeks before the end of Part One, remains in utero at the end of Part Two (Herbert and […]
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Dune: Part Two Unleashes the Terrible Power of Paul
Villeneuve is for the most part scrupulously faithful to the source material, which makes his most significant departures interesting and worth lingering on. The biggest is to compress the story chronologically so that Paul’s sister Alia, conceived weeks before the end of Part One, remains in utero at the end of Part Two (Herbert and […]
Read MoreWhat Holocaust Remembrance Forgets
Part of the Holocaust’s unknowability stems from its origins. Stone points in particular to the role of ideology in spurring the mass murder. We know well, naturally, that Adolf Hitler and other leading National Socialists were rabid antisemites. Hitler’s infamous autobiography Mein Kampf is an antisemite’s manifesto and Nazi propaganda was replete with antisemitic stereotype. […]
Read MoreAmerican Fiction Spares No One
Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) understands this and thus makes the decision to research those less fortunate than her in order to tell their story. But when Monk confronts his nemesis at a panel where they are the only two Black people debating the year’s best fiction, he is surprised that Golden reveals herself to be […]
Read MorePoor Things Is a Glorious Mash-Up
The film follows Bella’s picaresque adventures, as she leaves home to seek adventure, wisdom, or, ideally, both. Together, she and Duncan travel to Lisbon, where Bella wanders through the streets, blissfully unchaperoned and dressed in a puffy-sleeved top and bloomer shorts. “I found nothing but sugar and violence,” she reports back to Duncan. She can’t […]
Read MoreMerlin Sheldrake Will Change the Way You See Mushrooms
Sheldrake is less interested in making the case for how we can use fungi than in demonstrating with a kind of unbounded wonder how intimately fungi are connected with all forms of life. These relationships are the central subject of Sheldrake’s book. Life on earth as we know it is rooted—or perhaps I should say […]
Read MoreWhat Betty Friedan Knew
Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born in 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, the first child of Harry and Miriam. By the time they’d had another daughter and the main event of the longed-for son, Betty’s parents were beginning to find their eldest’s braininess worrisome. They learned, Shteir writes in her conscientiously researched book, “that to control Betty, […]
Read MoreThe Missing Love Story in Maestro
Maestro instead chooses to focus on how Bernstein’s bisexuality affected his family, and his relationship with Felicia in particular. When the film introduces young Lenny, he is in bed with a man; soon after, he meets Felicia at a party from behind the keyboard, where he seduces her to sing along. It is her 24th […]
Read MoreDemocracy Is in Peril, Just Not the Way We Thought
Levitsky and Ziblatt still make comparisons with other countries to marvelous effect, thickening their arguments in a gumbo of historical and contemporary examples from Brazil, Hungary, Argentina, Thailand, Italy, Chile, Germany, South Korea, and countless other states. But they also dig far deeper than before into America’s own violently authoritarian past, and the way that […]
Read MoreThurston Moore Said It Better in Music
The band found fans in America’s emerging punk clubs, and in Europe, where they were feted as the next big thing. By 1988’s Daydream Nation, the band were standard-bearers of the indie underground that now included hard-core punk groups like Black Flag alongside more melodic, even tuneful groups like REM and The Replacements. (Critic Robert […]
Read MoreChristopher Rufo’s Troubling Path to Power
From the mid-1990s onward, William S. Lind, a writer at the paleoconservative Free Congress Foundation, spread this account through a series of speeches, publications, and even a documentary film. In 2004, Lind published a book that included a compendium of cultural Marxist “profiles” with entries for Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Herbert […]
Read MoreIsrael Arms the World’s Autocrats—With Weapons Tested on Palestinians
How to summarize nearly a century of Zionist and Palestinian bloodshed and peacekeeping—of industrialization and expulsion, the birth of a “rules-based international order,” war, occupation, the DotCom boom? Loewenstein begins with his own story: He grew up in a “liberal Zionist” community in Melbourne—his grandparents had fled the Nazis in 1939, arriving in Australia as […]
Read MorePatrick Deneen’s Escape from Liberalism
This is an argument that has long been made by thinkers on the left. Deneen, however, reconfigures it by placing the evolution of the American political system amidst a semi-mystical battle between “the few” and “the many” that dates back to the dawn of time. In Deneen’s version the many are not masses seeking radical […]
Read MoreRidley Scott’s Napoleon: Accidentally a Comedy?
Perhaps this is the perspective that Scott, an 85-year-old Englishman, learned in school; certainly the script (written by David Scarpa, who previously collaborated with Scott on All the Money in the World) seems to have more respect for the Duke of Wellington, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat who handed Bonaparte his final defeat, than it does for […]
Read MoreNicolas Cage Can’t Escape Himself in Dream Scenario
It’s telling that Borgli’s producer for Dream Scenario is the enterprising horror specialist Ari Aster. His 2023 Beau Is Afraid cultivates a similar patch of thematic terrain, with Joaquin Phoenix starring as a middle-aged wreck navigating the shoals of his own paranoia; done up in shlubby, shuffling sad-sack drag, Phoenix even resembles Cage. The prevailing […]
Read MoreBig Publishing Killed the Author
More than ever before, editors and authors became cogs in a corporate machine, and these pressures increasingly showed up in their output. Then everything changed. In 1960, the newspaper Times Mirror Company purchased the mass-market publisher New American Library, inaugurating what Sinykin calls “the conglomerate era.” That same year, Random House went public and, flush […]
Read MoreA Murder at the End of the World Is Isolation TV at Its Best
The whole thing plays out as a True Detective in the style of Michael Clayton—a prestige whodunit fused with a startling comedy about the nearly occult style of corporate rot. The characters often speak with ethereal poetry, as if they’re mediums channeling spirit voices from beyond the veil. Lee, for instance, telling Darby that the […]
Read MoreThe End of Milton Friedman’s Reign
Friedman was not, by any reasonable definition of the word, a socialist in 1947, and always wanted the market to be the tool that solved social problems. It was for this reason that he became active in the Republican Party, which he judged more amenable to his views. When, in the run-up to the 1952 […]
Read MoreMitt Romney, Master of Self-Justification
Born in Detroit in 1947, Romney was the beloved youngest child and family “caboose,” spending more time with his father than his much-older siblings. He spent time with George at the offices of American Motors, where his father served as CEO, and had a front-row seat to the elder Romney’s political ascent. Despite his parents’ […]
Read MoreAlexander Payne’s School for Sad Sacks
Paul Hunham (Giamatti, again) certainly has elements of those characters. When we meet him, he is grading papers with his signature harshness, muttering about the “lazy,” “vulgar” “philistines” in his class. Hunham is the longtime, much despised Ancient Civilization teacher at Barton, where he was once a student. The school proves a daunting, frigid character […]
Read MoreAlexander Payne’s School for Sad Sacks
Paul Hunham (Giamatti, again) certainly has elements of those characters. When we meet him, he is grading papers with his signature harshness, muttering about the “lazy,” “vulgar” “philistines” in his class. Hunham is the longtime, much despised Ancient Civilization teacher at Barton, where he was once a student. The school proves a daunting, frigid character […]
Read MoreCan a New Generation of Luddites Take Down A.I.?
A blend of pacy narrative history and contemporary reportage, Blood in the Machine sees a fresh relevance in the struggles of these misunderstood rebels. The weavers’ combat against “machinery hurtful to commonality” was, in Merchant’s view, the earliest resistance to the destructive tactics of “big tech.” “Move fast, break things” operators like Musk, Thiel, and […]
Read MorePriscilla Confronts a Creepy Elvis
In Priscilla, Coppola leaves off-screen those tribulations of the Elvis myth—the death of his doting mother, Gladys; greedy exploitation at the hands of prescription-happy physicians and Colonel Tom Parker—that tend to excuse him as a victim, a truth that Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me” is careful not to deny. Priscilla’s Elvis is an insecure jock, […]
Read MoreThe Gilded Age Makes a Mess of the Picket Line
The parallels between The Gilded Age’s labor plotline and the labor plotline in which all of its cast members are currently embroiled are too neat to ignore. Morgan Spector is one of the revelations of this show, at least in part because he somehow imbues a part that could credibly be played by the Monopoly […]
Read MoreAnnie Ernaux’s Complex Passions
Should we be troubled by their relationship, with its age gap and power imbalances? Ernaux, a supporter of the #MeToo movement, addresses the question directly. “Our relationship could have been considered from the perspective of mutual gain,” she writes. “He gave me pleasure and made me relive things I would never have imagined experiencing again. […]
Read MoreYascha Mounk’s Woke Straw Man
How, when, and even whether these ideas escaped their academic homes is the real quandary. Most of Mounk’s thinkers penned their famous essays and monographs decades ago. Foucault published Discipline and Punish in 1975, and Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989. Why did their ideas only make it into the mainstream—according to Mounk—many years […]
Read MoreLydia Davis’s Very Short Stories to Save the World
On the second day, a sudden storm causes torrential flooding. Plans to see their friend again are thwarted. In the afternoon, during a break in the rain, she goes out on a walk alone down by the river with a map from the inn that points out trees and shrubs that grow along different trails. […]
Read MoreThe Curse of the AR-15
By the time the ban ended in 2004, the AR-15 was everywhere. In the three decades before the ban, 400,000 had been produced; while the ban was in effect, nearly 900,000 were made. In the 20 years since the ban’s end, the number of AR-15s sold has increased exponentially. For one, the bill inadvertently revealed […]
Read MoreWest Virginia University Is Everything That’s Wrong With Higher Education Today
Similarly, the 10 programs being cut at Vermont State University include applied business, computer engineering technology, climate change science, and school psychology. Cuts at Marymount University include mathematics, economics, and secondary education, among others. At the University of Maine, Farmington—the University of Maine system’s public liberal arts college—philosophy and religion, history, world languages, and women’s […]
Read More“Killers of the Flower Moon” Is a Groundbreaking Achievement
There’s no vanity in De Niro’s or DiCaprio’s performance; they are loathsome, petty, and thoroughly unworthy of the people whose trust they are betraying. Scorsese extensively researched and consulted with the Osage to ensure an accurate and three-dimensional portrayal of their society. Those efforts are on full display, but some (including the film’s Osage translator) […]
Read More“Navajo Police: Class 57” Takes a Long Look at an Impossible Job
It’s hard to escape the thought that the police are part of the cycle of violence. At the close of its second episode, Class 57 splices together footage of recruits being hazed and learning hand-to-hand combat with an introduction in what to expect on the job from victims of domestic violence (to begin the seminar, […]
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