Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s Gunner Palace began shooting in and around Baghdad four months after victory was declared in the largely American invasion of Iraq. This means that the film itself has now become part of the history of the still-ongoing guerrilla insurgency that keeps nibbling away at both American forces and Iraqi inhabitants. Read More
No one can accept that an imperial army has been annihilated by men with bows and arrows and rusty old guns who live in tents and never wash and cannot read or write. And who am I to jeer at life-giving illusions? Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming Read More
The dying year will be remembered for a single day. Did it, as was predicted at the time, change everything? Evidently not. Did it, as the counterintuitive types now suggest, change nothing? Only for the insulated, the detached and the heartless.
Movie stars may still consider themselves intellectuals, walking skeletons may still stroll down runways Read More
My fellow New Yorkers:
On Sept. 11, the forces of
hatred and barbarism attacked this city with cruelty and madness beyond our
comprehension. In the hours and days since, it has been my privilege and honor
to represent the unflagging spirit of New York. I have witnessed firsthand acts
of heroism and selflessness that will Read More
To the best of my memory, I only met Marc Rich once. It was
quite a while ago, in the Swiss Alps, whence he’d fled after Spain-his original
on-the-lam lighting point-suddenly became too hot (the Feds had started to
close in on him with a serious extradition deal, and there were rumors that a
contract Read More
Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World , by James Chace. Simon & Schuster, 512 pages, $30.
By force of intelligence, character and an uncommonly close partnership with President Harry Truman, Dean Acheson was 20th-century America’s most powerful Secretary of State. He was also its greatest, in the eyes of many historians Read More
