Features

By night, we drop bombs; by day, we drop peanut butter and jelly. Our daytime rounds, at least at the outset of the campaign, seem more symbolic than our nightly ones; the amount of food we’re delivering from the sky does not make up for the amount of food that no longer can be delivered […]

Nothing divides the labor movement like a good cityelection. To watch the calculus of narrow self-interest play out in the scrambledunion endorsements of candidates in this month’s New York mayoral primary is tobe grateful that all politics isn’t literally local–that at least rudimentaryconcerns of ideology tend to loom larger in state and national contests. In […]

Let there be no doubt that America is justified in going to war against what President Bush describes as terrorism of “global reach.” After September 11, we have to assume that any group willing to kill thousands of people in the World Trade Center’s twin towers would be willing to use weapons of mass destruction. […]

How dare director Tim Burton “reimagine” (he avoids the word “remake”) theclassic 1968 film Planet of the Apes? It’s a milestone in sci-fi history, a brilliant, many-layered social commentary, many Apes buffs would argue, and its timing and essence can never be revivified. Actually, it’s been more than ripe for reimagining for years. It isterribly […]

In “The Moviegoers,” a bleak New Yorker article from a few years back, the film critic David Denby bemoaned both the current state of movie culture and the marginal role of serious criticism in shaping popular taste. According to Denby, the commercialization of the whole enterprise has brought about a brand of slicked-up, dumbed-down cinema […]