While we are now awash in public expressions of hysteria directed towards Muslims, the voice of fear in American society has always been there in one form or another. Witness The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the forced removal of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II, and the on-going discriminatory laws against blacks…
Light has not always stood for reason, or for the power of the mind. All the tropes that became common during the Hellenistic era and Neoplatonic thought, and that were later recycled during the Enlightenment (when celebration was allotted to all things Greek) had a common ancestor. Light, before that, used to stand simply for…
Gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Republican and Democratic national conventions was still being offered by CBS and NBC in 1968, but ABC, lacking their resources, limited their coverage to a few hours in the evening and highlighted it with a ten-night debate between conservative author and commentator William F. Buckley Jr. and flamboyant liberal novelist and…
Is it any wonder that our current democratic systems have turned into popularity contests? Is it any wonder that most Western politicians primarily rely on intricate advertising schemes to continuously validate themselves? For those whose eyes still blink in bewilderment at what the political landscape looks like today, Gabe Polsky’s Red Army gives us an…
In the late 1990s, Egyptian born Mohammed Atta, whom it is believed was one of the pilots of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, is reported to have established Islamist contact and formed a terrorist cell while a student in Hamburg, Germany. This fact has alerted the intelligence community in Hamburg…
If you pay attention to nutrition labels on the food products you buy, you may notice that next to the number of grams of sugar, there is no percentage shown. The sugar industry made sure of that. What they don’t want consumers to know is that the sugar content of many of their products is…
Second-time director Jim Field Smith offers more than the recommended daily allowance with Butter, a comedy that lets political satire slip straight through its fingers, if you’ll excuse the puns. In truth, the film, centered around an elaborate butter-carving competition, is an admirable attempt at parody, but while it offers a lot by way of…
