A week ago last Saturday, the day before Mexico’s Presidential election, I was in Mexico City’s central district, crushed by thousands of people waving yellow flags and parading toward the city’s giant plaza. Young activists, middle-aged couples and squat old women in shawls shouted “Obrador! Obrador!” An S.U.V. squeezed through the crowd. Its door opened Read More
Earlier in the week, you may have heard a small, distant voice, speaking as from the bottom of a well. It was President George W. Bush, addressing the nation Monday night on immigration, from the vantage of his poll ratings, which lie in the low 30’s.
His subject and his inglorious position are Read More
Earlier in the week, you may have heard a small, distant voice, speaking as from the bottom of a well. It was President George W. Bush, addressing the nation Monday night on immigration, from the vantage of his poll ratings, which lie in the low 30’s.
His subject and his inglorious position are related. Mr. Read More
No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. Alfred A. Knopf, 309 pages, $24.95.
The first reaction is visceral, and should be recorded here before the critical faculty interposes to hedge and qualify: I was so thoroughly sucked in and freaked out by No Country for Old Men that whenever I had to put the Read More
Lou Dobbs, who has his own somewhat idiopathic show on CNN, hovers somewhere between avuncular and grandfatherly. Beneath his good manners and kindly ways, however, there is a steely man who has hobbyhorses to ride.
One of his horses, which he has been astride for several years, is an immoveable opposition to “wetbackism,” although he Read More
A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World , by Nicholas A. Basbanes. HarperCollins, 444 pages, $29.95.
In 1562, a Franciscan friar who had accompanied Spanish troops to Mexico ordered the burning of thousands of Mayan hieroglyphic books, in an attempt to eradicate the repository of local spiritual beliefs Read More
No rubber gloves are manufactured in the United States any more. The last factory making them, in Massillon, Ohio, closed a couple of years ago and moved production to Malaysia and India. Two hundred American workers were out on the street, which no doubt posed a bit of a problem for them, if not for Read More
Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mil e, from a screenplay by Scott Silver, has provided me with my brightest and most surprising pop-music epiphany since the Beatles in Richard Lester and Alun Owen’s A Hard Day’s Night shook up all my critical preconceptions 38 years ago and made me proclaim A Hard Day’s Night “the Citizen Kane Read More
Harry Potter and his cottage industry of goblins, gremlins and flying broomsticks is back in time to drain every 10-year-old’s holiday allowance from here to Honolulu. Do they still care? Judging from the preview audience of mesmerized moppets with whom I saw Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets , they do indeed, and then Read More
Remember the “service economy”? You know, the wonderful new “paradigm” that was supposed to replace the tired-out, boring old manufacturing economy. Have you forgotten already? The new economic “model” at once so clean and modern; the one advertised by all those smiling stockbrokers, software gurus and celebrity chefs; the one that was going to free Read More
