One morning, Paul Larkins is rudely awakened in his London home by frantic knocking and anguished shouting. A murder is announced: Maria, a 19-year-old dancer from a neighboring apartment, has been found in her bed with her throat slit. Larkins visits the scene of the crime and wonders how the perpetrator made the escape with the door locked and the key left inside and the distance from the window to the ground too far to drop. He reads testimonies in the newspaper from Maria’s landlady, fiancé, and colleague — and from a doctor who reveals Maria was pregnant. He learns that the crime’s complexities and anomalies “threaten to baffle the sagacity of the police.” He admits he found Maria attractive: “She was one of Beauty’s best thoughts.” Eventually, he also admits to killing her.
Despite its best efforts, Disney has lost the rights to Mickey Mouse — vintage Mickey, that is. The mouse’s first iteration, which appeared in the 1928 short film Steamboat Willie, is now in the public domain, meaning that anyone can take the old likeness of Mickey and use it as they wish.
As the new year is a time of new beginnings, here’s an old joke about the end of the world. A giant meteorite is headed toward Earth and will destroy all human life on impact. The pope addresses the Catholics: “The bad news is, we’re all going to die. The good news is, the faithful will be rewarded in heaven.” The Indian prime minister addresses the Hindus: “The bad news is, we’re all going to die. The good news is, we’ll be reincarnated.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the Jews: “The bad news is, we’re all going to die. The good news is, there will be no Palestinian state.”
In 1948, John Steinbeck and photographer Robert Capa embarked on a carefully choreographed tour of the Soviet Union. The resulting book, A Russian Journal, was meant to humanize the Soviet people to American readers spooked by mounting Cold War tensions. Steinbeck and Capa made for a memorable pair, drinking their way through stuffy official functions, feuding with a translator-cum-minder, and barely surviving several hungover flights on the Soviet Union’s primitive domestic air network. The book they produced, however, was compromised by the obvious constraints imposed by Soviet authorities, Steinbeck’s every interaction with “real” Russians, Ukrainians, and Georgians overcast by Stalin’s bleak shadow.
As the Washington Examiner reported two weeks ago, a range of U.S. and British military forces are deployed and ready to launch strikes against Houthi rebel positions inside Yemen.
Like all the best movies, Godzilla Minus One contains multitudes. A moving domestic melodrama, it is also a meditation on collective responsibility and individual guilt. A persuasive alternate history, it weighs, as well, the relative merits of love and honor. So effective is the film’s social commentary that the appearance of an iconic monster is almost, if not quite, superfluous. Might a sequel be arranged in which the protagonists quietly rebuild their lives with nary a prehistoric reptile in sight? Probably not. But I would pay to watch it.
Last week, I spoke to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) about something a little different from what many journalists in America have discussed with him: the strange combination of nostalgia and pain veterans like us experience at remembering our times in wars in which we served. DeSantis’s military service is, or should be, more relevant as he campaigns to be elected the first commander in chief in over 30 years to have been deployed to war.
For nearly two decades, one of the world’s most successful spies hid in plain sight. Ana Montes, a “superstar” employee for the Defense Intelligence Agency, was a highly decorated and well-respected analyst on Latin American affairs. But as Peter J. Lapp and Kelly Kennedy recount in their new book, Queen of Cuba, Montes’s loyalty was to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, not the United States.
Republican Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) tore into his GOP colleagues during a Thursday appearance on Newsmax, criticizing their approach to government funding and saying his colleagues in the party have “nothing to campaign on.” Biggs, former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, slammed his conference after being asked how many of the 12 individual spending...
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) revealed a proposal Thursday that would include paid family leave during pregnancy. “We think that we should be able to take care of expectant moms before the baby's born,” Hochul said at an event Thursday. “And we think that they should have time off, so everything's about to change.”...