What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White HouseBy Tevi Troy(Regnery, 416 pages, $18.95) HOW AWESOME CAN you get? The morning announcers on WTOP, Washington’s all-news station, couldn’t get over it. Bill…
AN ITEM HEADLINED “Wimping of America” in the Daily Caller a few weeks ago informed us that the intramural football program at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, allegedly the oldest in the nation, had been deemed by its (female)…
OVER THE SUMMER, the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued the report it had been tasked to produce when it was created in 2010. Titled The Heart of the Matter,…
Luc Besson made a couple of pretty good or at least pretty interesting movies twenty years or so ago. They were La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional. You could look them up on Netflix. But, since then, whatever tether…
FOUR YEARS AGO in this space (see “Rotten Apples,” TAS, September 2009), I wrote that movie violence, like movie sex, is inherently fantastical. This is because the context in which both sex and violence are normally experienced in real life…
At one point in The World’s End, Steven Prince (Paddy Considine), aged approximately 40, finally gets around to declaring his love for his high school crush, Sam Chamberlain (Rosamund Pike). Why didn’t he say anything before? she asks him. “I…
In one of the out-takes that play over the closing credits of We’re the Millers, directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball), three of the primary cast members — Jason Sudeikis, Will Poulter, and Emma Roberts — play a prank on…
It’s a truism that war robs us of our capacity for self-identification with others — or at least with those others whom we designate as “the enemy.” The act of killing would obviously be impossible without this hardening of the…
A key piece of information which is only revealed in the final minutes of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine and which, therefore, I must not reveal here changes everything we have thought about the film’s victim-heroine, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), up to…