The main problem with The Good Shepherd is its director. Robert De Niro is a great actor, and he had the money to hire a professional cast and crew, but he doesn’t have a good sense of how to edit or how to pace a movie. The Good Shepherd, which stars Matt Damon as Edward […]
If you came of age in the 1970s or the 1980s, you grew up hearing about “the war on drugs.” It wasn’t really a war on drugs. Similar to the it war on terror, the war on drugs was an open-ended call to arms with no clear enemy, an elaborate justification for a counterinsurgency against […]
That Brooklyn, the story of a young Irish immigrant to the United States in 1952, was nominated for a Best Picture award is a good argument for the Twitter hashtag #oscarsowhite. Brooklyn isn’t a great movie. It’s not every a very good movie. It’s a poorly written film with a schmaltzy overbearing sound track, and […]
Look Helen. The proletariat isn’t in danger. The proletariat is the danger. Trumbo is a conservative movie with a communist hero. Except for the film’s opening, where Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter behind classic films like Spartacus and Roman Holiday, supports a strike at one of the studios, communism almost never enters into the […]
Introduced as having held every significant position in economics within the United States Government, former Secretary of the Treasury and former Chief Economist of the World Bank Dr. Lawrence H. Summers gave a talk in Washington D.C. last week titled “Economic Statecraft and Global Order”. Lawrence Summer’s talk was considered “provocative” by the Center for Strategic […]
Lugard’s The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa was published in 1922. It discusses indirect rule in colonial Africa. In this work, Lugard outlined the reasons and methods that he recommended for the colonisation of Africa by Britain. Some of his justifications included spreading Christianity and ending ‘barbarism’ (such as human sacrifice). He also saw […]
Whether or not MKULTRA — the CIA’s mind control program that was shut down in the late 1960s and later revived as “enhanced interrogation” by the Bush administration after 9/11 – was developed as a response to the “brainwashing” of American prisoners of war in North Korea is largely an academic debate. Torture and mind […]
Dear Gazette: This letter, originally submitted on June 23, 2015, was intended as a response to Barbara Mazor’s June 11 letter, which claimed that BDS allegations regarding Soda Stream were unsubstantiated. Mazor’s claim, however, runs contrary to the body of letters published in the Gazette, which were replete with factual references. Nevertheless, I’m again providing […]
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo, the renowned Italian filmmaker and theater director, was born into the family that had ruled the great northern city of Milan since the time of Dante. Who better, therefore to direct the film version of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo, “The Leopard.” That Lampesusa died […]
Support for Bernie Sanders doesn’t skew male. It skews young. Last Fall, just as Bernie Sanders first emerged as a credible threat to take the Democratic Party nomination away from Hillary Clinton, the Atlantic published a curious little article by a writer named Robinson Meyer. Titled Here Comes the Berniebro, it argued that the typical […]
