The new PBS Masterpiece series Marble Hall Murders is a sumptuously filmed “cozy” with an unthreatening structural complexity. The Viking Cruises crowd will eat it up with a Christofle spoon.  Like its predecessors, Magpie Murders (2022) and Moonflower Murders (2024), the new show is based on a book by Anthony Horowitz, who returns here as […]

Dogs bark, ducks quack, and populists offer free stuff. Enrique Pena Nieto dispensed around 10 million TV sets to low-income Mexican households. Hugo Chavez gave Venezuelans steeply discounted refrigerators, air conditioning units, and, again, TV sets. In Argentina, Evita Peron would personally hand out children’s toys, sewing machines, clothes, and kitchenware. None of these (for once […]

During Donald Trump’s first run for the presidency, China, the economic behemoth that was gutting America’s manufacturing base and flexing its muscles in East Asia, was his favorite punching bag. Yet as Trump was seeking to reclaim the presidency after four years in the political wilderness, his new foreign target was much closer to home: […]