Before the internet, artificial intelligence, the International Space Station, and the mapping of the human genome, there was science fiction, which predicted it all. Where and when the genre began is debatable: among the ancestors of today’s science fiction are…
It’s a phenomenon as old as human culture itself. Il Paradiso represented a falling-off from Il Purgatorio. Paradise Regained wasn’t quite up there with Paradise Lost. Twain’s later Tom Sawyer books don’t hold a candle to the original adventures of…
Ten minutes after downloading Richard Bradford’s Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer, I was wondering what the hell I’d been thinking. No, that’s not it. I did know what I’d been thinking: It had been a long time since…
Well, now I know what it’s like being the full-time psychiatrist of a hyper-narcissistic celebrity. No, I haven’t gone to med school, been a psychiatric resident, and hung out a shingle. I’ve just read Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page’s memoir, Pageboy,…
July 25, 1985, was a red-letter day in the history of the AIDS epidemic. A publicist for the movie star Rock Hudson, who had been looking alarmingly gaunt and was now in hospital, announced that the actor had been diagnosed…
Confession: I’m a bookaholic. And I’ve been one all my life. Once, as a toddler, I was taken to visit my parents’ friends Martha and Eugenio, and the only thing I remember is being fascinated by the huge encyclopedia that…
In 1954, Warner Brothers released Dial M for Murder, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and adapted by Frederick Knott from his own play, which had done well on the West End and Broadway. And boy, could you tell that this flick…
There once was a British Labour Party politician named Glenda Jackson. She represented a London district in the House of Commons from 1992 to 2015, identifying strongly as a socialist, a feminist, and a republican (that is, a non-monarchist), serving…
One of Norway’s best-selling novelists is a 64-year-old lesbian named Anne Holt. She’s written about 20 crime thrillers, often with politically correct messages. (In Offline, a series of bombings attributed to Muslims turn out to have been committed by Norwegian…
In Carol Reed’s 1949 film noir The Third Man, Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, made a cynical comment for the ages: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced…