at AmCon–I think this piece turned out well: Ten years ago Marilynne Robinson began telling us the story of Gilead, Iowa, a tiny town surrounded by fields and farms. A droplet of water in which the whole world is reflected. She began with Gilead, a novel in the form of a long letter written from the dying John Ames to his young son. Ames situates the town in its historical context, showing how this apparently all-white enclave nonetheless falls under... Read more
at Film Comment: …On Gremlins, it did become a problem, though, when Steven [Spielberg] had to sign off on everything. We had to get him to make up his mind. For example, we had a lot of different designs for Gizmo, and Steven always found fault with whatever they were. We were getting to the point where we really had to lock this down, or we weren’t going to make our dates. So we came up with the idea of... Read more
asking the right questions: After three decades of watching the incarceration rate climb to unprecedented heights, Americans seem ready to usher in a new era of leniency. Some legislators are pushing to eliminate mandatory sentencing minimums for nonviolent drug offenders. Others are calling for the federal prison population to be slashed by letting some prisoners out early. Others still are advocating for incarcerated juveniles to be treated less harshly. Meanwhile, states all over the country are decriminalizing certain misdemeanor offenses... Read more
From the department of Those Who Can’t Do and/or Fools Rush In, so as always, this post is worth at most what you paid for it: Conservatives often argue that Americans have a Disneyfied, “soulmate” view of marriage, which makes us unprepared for the fact that marriage–like all vocations–can be terribly hard. I don’t think that’s quite right. We do have a cultural vocabulary for talking about the “hard parts” of marriage. The problem is that we have only one... Read more
reports: …That’s how it’s been for a decade for James Robertson, Detroit’s Walking Man. Twenty miles a day. One-hundred miles a week. More than 5,000 miles a year. In total, the equivalent of two trips around Earth. In that time, Robertson has never missed a day of work.”I just believe a man should work,” he told me. “Work takes care of your soul. The rest takes care of itself.” This outlook may have made Robertson rich in spirit, but it... Read more
This is just a quick Saturdayish post to say that ABC’s new sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat” is surprisingly enjoyable. It’s based on a memoir, which probably explains the specificity of the setting: The central character is Eddie Huang, a rap-loving plump kid whose parents move from DC’s Chinatown to suburban Florida in 1995 in order to open their own restaurant, the perpetually-struggling Cattleman’s Ranch. The humor mixes culture-clash jokes and nice specific details (one episode gets a lot of... Read more
this bit leapt out at me but whole thing is worth reading–if I had to give it an extremely reductive summary it might be, “Sex isn’t rational, and power is a temptation, not a tool”–see also btw the section on race: Increasingly, schools are being required to institutionalize prevention, to control the risk of harm, and to take regulatory action to protect the environment. Academic administrators are welcoming these incentives, which harmonize with their risk-averse, compliance-driven, and rights-indifferent worldviews and... Read more
in Commonweal: …From 2008 through 2010, I was a seminarian in St. Paul, Minneapolis, an archdiocese now entrenched in its own abuse scandal. My experience there led me to believe that the problem of priestly sexual abuse is due, at least in part, to the failure of seminaries to provide adequate human and sexual formation to men studying for the priesthood. More specifically, my seminary formation failed to confront the questions surrounding sexual abuse in a candid and psychologically sophisticated... Read more
for the Weekly Standard: When the sociologist Timothy Nelson asked low-income men who didn’t live with their children what the ideal father was like, eight of them spontaneously mentioned the same man: Ward Cleaver, the dad from Leave It to Beaver. That might make sense if Nelson’s interviews had taken place in the 1950s-60s, when the show aired; but these men were interviewed in the late 2000s. Why did they hark back to a man old enough to be their... Read more
Looks stellar. From Kino Lorber: Among the most fascinating chapters of film history is that of the so-called “race films” that flourished in the 1920s – ‘40s. Unlike the “black cast” films produced within the Hollywood studio (such as Stormy Weather or Green Pastures), these films not only starred African Americans but were funded, written, produced, directed, distributed, and often exhibited by people of color. Entrepreneurial filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, and Richard D. Maurice not only built... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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