Amusements Rick McGinnis Seven years ago, a New York City columnist named Lenore Skenazy wrote a column about letting her nine-year-old son Izzy take public transit home by himself. Within days, she was at the centre of a media furore that saw Lenore dubbed “World’s Worst Mom,” and found herself made a standard bearer for whatever pushback is happening against [...]
The cover of a recent New York magazine promised so much – far more than I knew it would deliver, but I couldn’t resist. “There are over a million terminated pregnancies in American every year,” it read, under the headline “My Abortion,” “yet few women will ever talk about their experience.” Living in a country where actually talking about abortion is discouraged [...]
The worst part of being a TV critic, I used to joke to my friends, was having to watch television. Like most jokes, it was mostly a statement of fact. The worst thing about watching TV in the last decade or so was a ubiquity of a lazy trope, played for laughs, that cast men as the village idiot of the family. [...]
I didn’t watch television for nearly 20 years, roughly from when Knight Rider hit the air to when the first season of The Sopranos debuted. Only a few years after that I found myself – quite against my will – writing a daily TV column for a national newspaper, but as the one-time child who grew up with That Girl and Petticoat [...]
Roger Kimball is a well-read man. Reading through his latest book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press, $36, 356 pages), I couldn’t help but envy whatever combination of discipline, habit, choice of profession and luck has let him trawl through the remainder tables of ideas and come up with a collection of essays [...]
Brian Sewell Just a few weeks ago, a British art critic named Brian Sewell described, in an article for the Daily Mail newspaper, how he was going to kill himself. “I shall write a note addressed ‘To whom it may concern’ explaining that I am committing suicide,” Sewell wrote, “that I am in sound mind, that no one else has [...]
Last summer, I wrote a column reviewing a trio of films about the apocalypse – two very serious dramas and a low-key comedy that all ended with the extinction of life as we know it. You know – classic summer movie fare. Karl Marx didn’t get much right, but his observation that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, has [...]
In a world where serious books sell poorly and newsmagazines are a shadow of their former selves – if they’re published at all – the documentary film has taken up much of the burden of bringing topical issues and debate in front of the public. While feature films have stagnated, pooling into either numbing blockbusters or a host of increasingly spiritless genres, [...]
If any single battle has come to dominate the ongoing culture war between the right and the left, it would probably be gay “marriage.” The more you linger over the argument, however, the less it seems like either side is talking about the same thing. One side talks about marriage like it’s a purely social arrangement, changing with the times and sanctified [...]
Anthony Quinn as Pope Kiril in the film version of Morris West's novel The Shoes of the Fisherman When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires stepped onto the balcony at St. Peter’s Square last month, he helped provide a satisfactory conclusion to a ritual that – as we were told repeatedly in the thicket of media coverage – is [...]
Lena Duham It’s a truism that every generation believes that the ones immediately following it will preside over the dismantling of every social, cultural and economic virtue that they took for granted, a rite of passage for senior generations that begins roughly when they realize that they’ve slipped out of the green vale of youth. There’s no objective way of [...]
While the political battle over abortion has hardened into a seemingly intractable stalemate, the pro-life side of the issue can take some small comfort in the fact that, at least on the cultural front, abortion remains a hard sell. To be sure, secularized liberals whose support for abortion remains an article of faith almost wholly occupy the strategic high ground – the [...]
I doubt that I’m the only person who found the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy SEALS last year unsatisfying, both as a skirmish in an ongoing war and, looking at it a bit more flippantly, as a dramatic finale. For all the counter-espionage resources that it took to find the man, and the undeniable military skill of the SEALS [...]
Amusements Rick McGinnis Thanks to laser-sharp marketing geniuses who regard the perfect moviegoer as a comics-reading teenager with no memory whatsoever of any film made before 2001, feature film production has slipped into only occasionally lucrative irrelevance. As if to compensate, the lowest end of the film production market – documentaries, made for little money with even less expectation of [...]
St. Clement lofts Toronto I’d like to take a break from the usual subjects of this column – movies, TV and books, mostly – to talk about something that might not seem at all related: real estate. I live in a city (Toronto) where real estate – buying and selling, house values, property taxes, neighbourhoods, amenities and development – are [...]