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Finding Faith in the Fragments

Peter Tonguette

When your parents were married for seventeen years before you were born, as mine were, you spend an awful lot of time scrutinizing scrapbooks, absorbing family lore, and trying...

2024: Our Year in Film and Television

Mark Bauerlein Peter Tonguette

We asked some of our editors and writers to contribute a paragraph about the most memorable films and TV shows they watched this year. Mark Bauerlein Some of the...

Marijuana and the Movies

Peter Tonguette

We live in a nation in which marijuana use is tolerated, accepted, sanctioned, and even celebrated to a degree that would have shocked Americans not so long ago. Once,...

The Dark Side of “Miracle Drugs”

Peter Tonguette

The United States is hooked on a regular regimen of pills, tablets, and capsules. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, during the years 2015–18 some 48.6 percent...

The Lost World of Jazz

Peter Tonguette

In an age when mass gatherings more often than not suggest the social upheaval of the last two years, it is helpful to be reminded that not all teeming...

The Golden Age of Censorship

Peter Tonguette

The history of American cinema in the twen­tieth century is understood today as a march from inhibition to expression. The films produced during the long reign of the Motion...

Sondheim’s Cynicism

Peter Tonguette

When Stephen Sondheim died in late November at ninety-one, the eulogies, tributes, and bouquets from critics and ­tastemakers were entirely expected. The Broadway composer and lyricist left the Earth...

Peter Bogdanovich, the Man Who Knew Too Much

Peter Tonguette

These days, the history of cinema is treated like the history of just about anything else: with a combination of neglect and ignorance, willful or otherwise. Just take a...

Sincerely, Rodgers & Hammerstein

Peter Tonguette

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who comprised the most consequential partnership in the history of American musical theater, were brought together by chance. It happened in the early...

At Home on Revolutionary Road

Peter Tonguette

One of the hoariest clichés of American popular culture is anti-suburban sentiment. Common throughout literature, film, and television, it arguably received its most tuneful expression in Malvina Reynolds’s 1962...