Back in the 1950s, when Sergeant Friday started fighting Los Angeles crime on NBC’s Dragnet, it wasn’t only the television screen that was black and white. The...
TV and film
When I was growing up in a white Southern working-class home, country music was simply the air we breathed. Even as a rock and roll-crazed teenager, I still...
From Netflix’s The Crown to HBO’s Chernobyl, historical dramas are all the rage. While learning some history is part of the draw, most viewers accept that...
When you turn on the television, the people you see may look like you. But if they don’t, you may feel invisible to the very culture in which you live. The...
My good friend John von Heyking published a marvelous book in 2016, The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship (McGill-Queen’s University Press)...
Penda’s Fen, my favorite of a subgenre of made-for-TV British pastoral horror films that includes Robin Redbreast and Whistle and I’ll Come to You, originally...
A demon and an angel, sitting on a park bench, commiserate about imminent Armageddon and agree: The loss of excellent bookshops, neighborhood cafes where they...
German filmmaker Werner Herzog loves Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union. He says so right in the middle of his documentary, Meeting...
Two documentaries currently trending on Netflix take a look at the planet from decidedly oppositional perspectives—and they might change how you think about...
“Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination,” writes Andrew Solomon, psychologist and author of Far From the Tree, a book recently adapted into...
