Essays
1090 results
Page 73
"Paranormal Activity 3': What ghosts really want
Never take a picture of a ghost
You know the old adage, “A watched pot never boils”? In Paranormal Activity 3, the opposite holds true: A mysterious household spirit seems to respond to an audience pretty much the way Bob Hope did.
Essays
4 minute read
Healing and history
I hated you, I love you: Political lessons from Europe
The French, Germans and Poles used to be preoccupied with destroying each other. Now they're obsessed with understanding and embracing each other, in a seemingly endless round of cultural exchanges, museum exhibitions and academic conferences. Is there a lesson here for angry Americans?
Essays
4 minute read
My "Time,' "Life' and "Fortune' in Luceland
Steve Jobs changed your life? How about Henry Luce?
I was an eager-beaver academic with ambitions to change society, until my chutzpah landed me in a far more fertile intellectual stew: Henry Luce's Time Inc. media empire in its heyday. My exhilarating experiences there persuaded me that the best hope for raising society's cerebral standards lies not with academics but with media innovators like Luce or, more recently, Steve Jobs.
Essays
7 minute read
You too can appear on a postage stamp
Lick the living, from your Postal Service
The U. S. Postal Service recently announced that it will soon issue stamps featuring people who are still alive, which it hopes will appeal to collectors. But what happens if you're stuck with an old roll of Eliot Spitzers?
Essays
1 minute read
Capital punishment as an oxymoron
A tale of two executions
Troy Davis was probably wrongly convicted of murder. Lawrence Brewer was almost surely guilty of an egregious racial killing. But both executions demonstrated why capital punishment is wrong in itself.
Essays
6 minute read
September Surf Song
Body and spirit together, for a few weeks more
Hemingway fought his big fish; I still fight the surf. Especially when the sea lets me forget that my body's growing older.
Essays
4 minute read
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The 9/11 Anniversary: Enough already
Ten years after: What price vengeance?
I was as angry at 9/11 as anyone else, and as gung-ho about going after Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. That moment passed when I saw that what we were doing to ourselves and others far exceeded the harm that had been done to us, and with far more lasting consequences.
Essays
3 minute read
How to respond to tyrants?
A tale of three tyrants (and one confused U.S. president)
America's deeply inconsistent response to uprisings against three Middle East tyrants— Mubarak in Egypt, Qaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria— suggests the confusion, inconsistency and (in Libya's case) the cynicism of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Essays
6 minute read
The Zen of getting canned
Losing a job isn't cancer (but then, what is?)
Surely surviving cancer, three different times, would throw everything else in life into perspective, I thought. Then I got fired.
Essays
4 minute read
Poet Philip Levine's working-class credentials
Limousine proletarian
Is America's new poet laureate a champion of the underclass or an adolescent poseur who has made a shtick of identifying with abused workers?
Essays
3 minute read