Opinion

California has fallen on hard times, wrestling with nationwide highs for the price of anything — from gas to homes to energy. Worry not though, struggling Californians: Hollywood is getting more tax credits. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), alongside Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, is fighting to more than double California’s Film & Television Tax Credit […]

“Pitch perfect.” “Fresh.” “Really good.” So say the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican of Netflix’s new docuseries, The Comeback, a three-episode look at the Boston Red Sox’s historic 2004 playoff victory over the New York Yankees. Are New York critics as effusive? Hard to say. Word out of Gracie Mansion […]

As a homeschooling mother of six children, including four boys, our home library of children’s books is extensive. My older children are reading chapter books, and they are consuming them faster than I can research them and obtain them from the library and used booksellers. For my oldest daughter, it’s not particularly difficult to procure […]

Throughout movie history, few genres have been more consistently disparaged, disrespected, and disdained than what might be called the cancer-crossed romance. To their cynical critics, movies such as Sweet November, Dying Young, and A Walk to Remember offer the unseemly spectacle of attractive characters navigating their romantic lives while contending with a terminal illness. Yuck. […]

One of the hallmarks of great literature is that it reminds readers that their feelings have already been felt, their despair suffered, and their hopes shared by people across time and place. In other words, they’re normal. One of the hallmarks of social media is that it teaches users that they’re not.  “You don’t have […]

I told you last time about how I feared Army basic training after watching the portrayal of Marine recruit training in the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. When I learned my new friend, retired Marine Chief Warrant Officer 4 Dan Ritter, had served as a Marine drill instructor, or DI, I knew he’d have a […]

For plenty of Reaganite conservatives of four- or five-decade-long standing, the thought of voting for former President Donald Trump always has been anathema. And still is. Even for those who absolutely can’t vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump remains a rocket blast too far. We’ll cast write-in votes instead. Because so many Trump fans […]

Randy Barnett’s absorbing new memoir begins, like any good story, in medias res: with his trailblazing oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, in the landmark Gonzales v. Raich case, on behalf of individual freedom — a fitting vignette for a book bearing the title A Life for Liberty. A constitutional law professor at Georgetown […]

Former President Donald Trump has a well-established history of not accepting election results that don’t go his way. But as the Supreme Court rules in favor of legal efforts by Republican governors to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls, the Democratic Party must step up and reassure voters, whom it has given plenty of reason […]

A Democratic campaign theme and even an advertisement in its closing stretch is a sign, for some of us past the age of 50, that the zeitgeist has completely left us behind. Not that the zeitgeist’s disdain for our apparently old-fashioned sensibilities wasn’t already obvious. We regularly see open, public vulgarity from presidential candidates of […]

Living in Manhattan, as I did for years, means that Saturday morning errands entail a complicated set of calculations about how much, exactly, you can carry. Groceries, wine, large hardware items — all of these go into the mental adding machine (mine is more like an abacus) as you decide which combination of things you […]