I intended to write only one movie-themed Valentine’s Day piece this week — on how the death of the heteronormative love story by a thousand feminist cuts — the banishment of male role models, femininity erasure, “Me Too” abuse, gender…
The other day, as part of my constant effort to find non-political content to vary my daily cultural diet, I started listening to a new series of YouTube podcasts about the life of Lucille Ball. Produced by Turner Classic Movies,…
The LGBTQ media organization GLAAD has pulled from the internet its blacklist of over 200 politicians, journalists, and commentators who, it claims, use their “influence and power to spread misinformation and harm LGBTQ people.” The organization calls the blacklist the…
I grew up after Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s era, but I never stopped hearing from liberals about 1950s Hollywood blacklists. Yet a monumental Oscar-winning director like Elia Kazan, who directed extraordinary movies that grippingly advanced freedom and human understanding, had antagonized…
“This class struggle plays hell with your poetry,” John Reed, the first of three Americans buried in the Kremlin Wall, famously remarked. It sure did for his friend Max Eastman, who wrote Artists in Uniform as a way of ridiculing…
We came together after 9/11 as Americans. We formed a bond of unity the likes of which I could not remember save for when I was a child during World War II. Then, housewives rolled bandages at night for the…