Features

Reflecting their status in society at large, neurology and neuroscience have in recent years become major forces in American arts and media, charting new narrative pathways. If noted at all, this development has been written off as only another example of our culture’s hunger for varieties of victimhood. But such a judgment trivializes the change. […]

You probably haven’t heard of him, but Rob Nelson is working hard to change that. Nelson, the thirty-something host of the FOX News Channel’s fledgling Saturday night talk show The Full Nelson, wants to run for political office (he doesn’t say which office, but the show’s audience coordinator cheerfully told me that she believes Nelson […]

Erin Brockovich is the quintessential star vehicle–for nearly two hours, Julia Roberts is almost never out of camera range–but it’s also the kind of message movie we haven’t seen for a while. It’s the latest and biggest of the “feisty woman” movies, eponymously titled and mostly true tales of working women who, against impossibly long […]

Every weekend of my childhood, it seemed, my parents would pack my sisters and me into the family Montego, and we’d head to Long Island, looking for houses. We children didn’t dread the routine, the highway drive from Brooklyn and the perpetually deferred decisions. Instead, we reveled in the fantasy. First we chose which room […]

In 1994, before book after book documented how the tobacco industry had successfully manipulated the public’s perceptions about smoking, the eminent historian and author Stephen E. Ambrose took the stand in a Louisiana case brought by Gere Covert, a Baton Rouge attorney who decided to sue after the death of his wife, a longtime smoker, […]

When last I wrote in these pages about the portrayal of women on television, I argued that the creators of shows such as FOX’s Ally McBeal and NBC’s Providence seem unable to conceive of thirty-something women as concerned about anything other than marriage and childbearing. After perusing the offerings of Oxygen, the new cable television […]

Balinese gamelan sounds like magic: part rain on the roof, hammering down in relentless cascades as it does on this small, tropical Indonesian island; part sunlit shimmer, as the quavering melodies float from the synchronized mallets of as many as 50 or 100 musicians in the gamelan orchestra. Balinese gamelan sounds impossible–fragile and invigorating–and for […]

In the remarkable opening moments of a 1995 film by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a cameraman sits on the roof of a car as it makes its way slowly through a mob of Tehrani males–most of them thin, mustachioed, hungry-eyed. The camera records, the throng pushes and swells, and soon a near-riot breaks out as […]

I‘ve always thought of my portraits as my own version of the Museum of Natural History,” Errol Morris said a few years ago, “these very odd dioramas where you’re trying to create some foreign exotic environment and put it on display.” Those portraits–in nonfiction films such as Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, A […]

The American automobile will soon change dramatically. The Ford Taurus of the future will be the same size as today’s Taurus, deliver the same performance, and cost about as much, but it will have a new engine efficient enough to go from Washington to Miami on a single tank of fuel. Without great sacrifice, Americans […]