Garrett Epps

Ask the average TV writer what word he associates with “evil” and the answer is likely not to be “Milosevic” or “Enron” but “private law firm.” TV writers don’t really know what goes on in the plush offices of big firms, but they know it’s bad. No less a cultural indicator than acclaimed scriptwriter Joss […]

One of television’s persistent puzzles is why the United States, which essentially invented the medium, has taken so long to master televised high narrative. For 30 years, the British have been churning out Masterpiece Theatre miniseries that satisfy the inner soap fan while also teasing the intellect. Only in the last few years, however, with […]

“The two omnipresent parties of history,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1841, are “the party of the Past and the party of the Future.” The problem, now as then, is knowing which political party — Republican or Democrat — is which. Continental Divide, a fascinating linked pair of plays by British playwright David Edgar that […]

In 2001 historian David Brion Davis wrote in The New York Times, “The United States is only now beginning to recover from the Confederacy’s ideological victory following the Civil War.” In fact, reports of our recovery may be exaggerated; many white Americans are still holding out in the jungle like Japanese soldiers after World War […]

As a character in a James Thurber cartoon once said, I am still waiting for greatness to be thrust upon me. Watching cable news, I clutch my remote in rage as I imagine myself, gifted with overnight power but unburdened by political debts or campaign commitments, striding the corridors of influence and driving the Beltway […]