Out of the Past
Nobody in America identified “film noir” as a distinct genre when those dark, crime-centered movies, dense with fatalism and cynicism, were actually being turned out …
Conspiracy of Dunces
Despite an instinctive skepticism about all official explanations and reports, I don’t believe a word of the extravagant 9/11 conspiracy theories currently breeding and mutating …
Bureaucracy, Red in Tooth and Claw
A coyote was spotted in Central Park in Manhattan in late March, loping through the mini-wilderness of Hallet Sanctuary, a wooded island at the south …
The Unhappy Few
Stendhal famously said that he wrote for “the happy few.” Meanwhile it’s the unhappy few who have been causing most of the trouble since about …
Pope In Quandary About Limbo
ROME – After 30 prominent theologians who met in the Vatican in December agreed that it’s time for the Roman Catholic doctrine of limbo to …
Time, Devourer of All Things
One of the least noticed, let alone resisted, oppressions of contemporary life is the ruthless tyranny of time, our clock- police state. Everywhere Big Brother, …
Exit, Frothing
The reports of God’s death, written by Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, and others in the 19th century, were, in Mark Twain’s immortal phrase, greatly exaggerated. God …
Bohemian Rhapsody
The battle between bourgeois and bohemian was probably the longest-running vaudeville comedy act in Western history, each thwacking the other with rolled-up newspapers for about …
Santa Seeks WMD’s
NORTH POLE – In response to Denmark’s announcement in October 2004 that it was exploring the possibility of claiming the North Pole as part of …
The Madness of King Dubya
Sometime around the end of the 19th or the beginning of the 20th century, nations began to have identity crises, like the individuals who compose …