How much the Beatles helped create the ’60s and how much the ’60s helped create the Beatles is one of the great chicken-and-egg questions.
Tom Carson
Tom Carson won two National Magazine Awards during his stint as Esquire’s “Screen” columnist and has been nominated twice more as GQ’s movie reviewer. Formerly a staff writer at LA Weekly and The Village Voice, he is the author of Gilligan’s Wake (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2003) and Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter.
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HBO Movie on Prop 8 Marriage Equality Case Fails As Documentary
By omitting the faces and fears of those opposed to same-sex marriage, The Case Against 8 presents its story as nothing more than a victory lap, assuming every viewer is happy the Supreme Court decision that overturned California’s ban.
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New Film About Liberal Gadfly Gore Vidal Totally Misses the Point
Gore Vidal rejoiced in making his readers’ lives more complicated by baring the power drives underneath our political pieties. The United States of Amnesia does him, and its audience, no justice.
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Sinkhole In My Heart: A Love Song to the American South
If I meant to rub their noses in it as well as open their eyes, no wonder: I was fed up with New York City chauvinism.
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The Brothers Koch: Family Drama and Disdain for Democracy
Lawsuits are the billionaire brothers’ weapon of choice—against each other—writes Daniel Schulman in his first-rate new bio. But buying our democracy, and maybe killing it, is pure self-interest.
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Hipster Vampires in the Ruins of Motor City
While the latest offering from director Jim Jarmusch may be about blood-sucking bohemians, it’s really a lament for the vanishing culture of the Beat Generation and mid-century rock and roll.
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The Clear-Eyed Utopianism of Ellen Willis
One of her work’s most salutary effects is its reminder that to cut yourself off from utopian impulses is to die a little.
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Jack Bauer Lives Another Day. The Question Is: ‘Why?’
Why has Fox’s pro-torture, 24 TV series not been put out of our misery?
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Francois Mitterrand, the Man with a Plan
A new biography of the former president of France examines the man’s setbacks, gambles, and pragmatic self-reinventions.
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Two Roads Diverged
The fates of the stars of 1964’s The World of Henry Orient say much about the decade in which they came of age.