Which came first? Col. Steven J. Lockjaw or commander-at-large Gregory K. Bovino?
Books, Arts and Culture
Read reviews and commentary on books, movies, video, tv, radio, podcasts, streaming, documentary, media, religion, history, sports, arts and entertainment, social media, Hollywood
Lula’s Investment in Anti-Fascist Brazilian Films Wins Big at Golden Globes
The Secret Agent won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and Best Actor, increasing Americans’ understanding of Brazilian cinema and history.
‘Cadillac Desert’ Reconsidered
Marc Reisner’s 1986 book demonstrates how a hypertrophic judiciary combines with America’s deadlocked legislature to make vast swaths of Western water policy dependent on 19th-century legal norms.
The Hit Hollywood Didn’t Want
Ryan Coogler’s bloodsucker blockbuster is all about Black creative freedom. No wonder the industry saw it as a threat.
The Internet’s Tollbooth Operators
Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction chronicles the way Big Tech platforms have turned against their users.
Artifice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
To understand the tech mindset is to see that the ultimate goal is domination. Silicon Valley elites apply a different standard to themselves because, quite simply, they believe that they deserve a different set of rules and expectations.
Brown Stage Capitalism
Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022, though it was hardly a new phenomenon even then. In granting apps the right to wield the absurdities of intellectual property law to legally bully their users, the government emboldened tech founders to view their companies as exempt from laws and regulations.
America’s Greatest Mistake
This article appears in the October 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. The World’s Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right) By David J. Lynch PublicAffairs For a time, globalization was synonymous with utopia: the untrammeled flow of capital across borders, new markets waiting to be opened, the growth of developing […]
Why the Israel-Palestine Conflict Remains Unresolved
Two former negotiators on opposite sides write that neither side has ever acknowledged the other side’s existential needs.
This Proposed Media Empire Runs on AI
Oracle scion David Ellison wants to combine two of the largest movie studios and streaming networks, along with dozens of cable stations.

