Reviews of Blonde, adapted from the Joyce Carol Oates biographical novel of the same title, and the 1951 film, The Enforcer.
462 search results for: Sexual Politics
What Bernie & The Donald Portend
Three weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, and clarity emerges. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, is in trouble. Polls show her slightly ahead of Socialist Bernie Sanders in Iowa, but narrowly behind in New Hampshire. And the weekend brought new revelations about yet more classified and secret documents sent over her private email server...
‘Woke’ Evolution
A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution Ed. Jeremy DeSilva Princeton Universtiy Press 288 pp., $27.95 The complex debate about the place of Darwinian theory in discussions about humankind’s nature has been further complicated by an academic left that has taken up trashing Darwin—who is, after...
American Ideas, Then and Now
Ten years or so ago Stephen Fry, English polymath, writer, TV personality, stage and screen actor, and many other things, gave a Spectator-sponsored lecture at the prestigious Royal Geographical Society. His theme was appreciation for America, where he said he would choose to live “in a heartbeat.” I know Stephen and paid extra attention to...
‘Risky Business’ As Conservative Morality Tale?
“Risky Business” wasn’t supposed to be a sly indictment of capitalism. A coming re-release from the Criterion Collection restores the director’s original intention as a warning about crazy women and the power of sex to destroy men.
The Politics of Morbid Fascination
Rafael Palmeiro has ED. How do I know? He told me. He told you, too. Heck, he told the whole country about 15 years ago. He went on national television (while intermittently swinging a big bat—Freudian subtlety is lost on the Madison Avenue types) to say that he was having a bit of trouble with...
Bring Me a Grape
What a peculiar, in some respects downright weird little world this fascinating biography introduces us to. Imagine a very clever, very plain, very spoiled little boy, born at the turn of the century into the intensely competitive upper-middle or lower-aristocratic class in Britain. Conventional success at sports, diplomacy, the professions, or business being ruled out...
My Kavanaugh Hearing Nightmare and ‘Oprah Moment’ on Fox
One thing I learned from my ordeal in the limelight of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations is that the truth is always more complicated than the narrative.
An Epic Bogosity
Edmund Spenser (1554-99) decided while still a student to make himself into the great English poet on the model of Vergil. So he began his publishing career with a set of 12 pastorals, and planned an enormous 24-book allegorical romance-epic, The Faerie Queene, to glorify Elizabeth I and her Britain as Vergil had glorified Rome...
Screen
Goodbye, Peter Pan The Big Chill; Directed by Lawrence Kasdan It is unique in that it has something for virtually everyone to hate. Consider the characters, all eight. They are the types of people that our parents warned us about in the late 60’s and early 70’s: not the drug pushers who lurked behind bushes,...
What We Are Reading: February 2024
Short reviews of The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon.
Criticism Lite
Any reader familiar with Martin Amis’ novels—especially his most recent, Money: A Suicide Note (1984)—will not be surprised by the relentlessly contemptuous tone of The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, a collection of his essays and articles on America and Americans. While Amis confesses at the outset that he “feel[s] fractionally American” (his...