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...
TV and film
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...
Anyone who has trouble grasping the notion that human nature is simultaneously divine and depraved just doesn’t know enough about the history of the popular...
Baltimore wants so badly to be known for its waterfront and its historic neighborhoods, but instead it is famous for murder, gang wars, and police brutality...
In the late 1960s my boy cousins were all about Star Trek. This was frustrating because, for the three years the show was on the air, our play would be...
