If there’s anything uglier and stupider than most of the songs performed at the annual Eurovision Song Contest, it’s the boneheaded politics that have, from time to time, intruded upon this gaudy, glitzy international event. This year’s big show won’t…
What do you think of when you hear the words “Nordic welfare state”? Government-run health care, with reasonable fees for regular check-ups but long waiting lists for certain life-saving treatments? Free university education, the proviso being that there may not…
American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus from Blue States to Red States By Roger L. Simon (Encounter Books, 224 pages, $30) Among the holdings in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art are two paintings…
Tár was released on Oct. 7, 2022, and for a while afterwards, I did everything I could, short of getting on an airplane, to see it. A big part of the reason was Cate Blanchett. I first saw her in…
For decades during the postwar era, Leonard Bernstein occupied a unique place at the red-hot center of both America’s high and middlebrow culture. While serving as music director of the New York Philharmonic, he conducted major orchestras around the world…
Last month, reporting here on the first part of the sixth and last season of The Crown, I was, if I say so myself, a mite snotty. I more or less accused the series’ creator, Peter Morgan, of shamelessly squeezing…
Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever By Matt Singer (G.P. Putman’s Sons, 352 pages, $30) In the late 1960s, Gene Siskel was a young reporter at the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert a young reporter at the…
I’ve never entirely understood why, when the subject is death-dealing psychopathic dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, Napoleon almost always gets a pass. No, he didn’t put Jews into concentration camps — in fact, one of his few genuine reforms…
Another year, another installment of The Crown. The series, which started in 2016, has been a cash cow for Netflix. But the end is in sight. The first four episodes of the sixth season went out to the world on…
Until I stumbled across a live online feed a few minutes after it started, I wasn’t aware that a “March for Israel,” largely involving young Jews who’d traveled from all over the U.S. and Canada, was going to be held…