Patrick O'Hannigan
Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America By Anne Coulter Crown Forum, 368 pages, $28.99 Ann Coulter has a gift for exasperating even the people who agree with her, but she is also an underrated public intellectual and one…
Like other tabloids of its kind, the Independent Weekly out of Raleigh, NC mixes concert reviews, movie listings, and “escort service” ads with self-consciously progressive opinion columns. Its editorial position on most issues can be summarized as Sticking it to…
RE: Tom Bethell’s The Decline of Faith: Dear Tom, Thank you for that article on the decline of faith. It was an enjoyable essay, and my reaction to it has nothing to do with schadenfreude, because the trends you cite worry…
There are better ways to greet a teenager who wakes up and asks where the newspaper is than by reminding him that he can’t read the paper until he’s cleaned the cat box and watered the hydrangeas, but I hadn’t…
Should baseball crowds at a game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Mets have chanted “USA! USA!” on hearing about Osama Bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs last Sunday night? Should college students at…
Big Top metaphors must be trendy. My friend Bill recently paraphrased the argument of one libertarian writer as “Paul Krugman is a bozo.” Not to be outdone, White House advisor David Plouffe borrowed an image from the midway to denounce…
Frontier storyteller Louis L’Amour sometimes referred to trusted companions as people with whom you’d want to “ride the river.” For every man or woman who fits that evocative description, however, there are others whose talents run more toward “poisoning the…
Sarah Palin loves the limelight. Despite that and the limitations that she shares with other people who rely more on instinct than on study to answer political questions, Palin also has an impressive talent for living rent-free in progressive heads….
Barack Obama will never write an acclaimed vampire novel because he has no respect for ritual. To make sense of that statement and explain why the indictment within it matters, let’s examine a few examples of genre fiction before sifting…
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End was a big-budget example of scriptwriting by committee, and many of the people involved in making it should have walked the plank. Nevertheless, that 2007 film and the franchise of which it is…
