In declaring that it is inappropriate for a straight actor to play a gay man on screen, Hanks negates the importance of the shared humanity that makes him empathetic in the first place. Continue Reading »
Commitment makes Maverick the oldest and truest type of Naval officer; the oldest and truest type of American; and finally, the oldest and truest type of man. Continue Reading »
Despite its noir trappings and deeply dysfunctional Gotham, The Batman shows its protagonist growing in a way few other portrayals have. Continue Reading »
As his latest album demonstrates, a subset of Sting’s songs reverberates with the legacy of an urban English Catholic childhood of the 1950s and ’60s. Continue Reading »
Modern people, despite being drawn to medieval aesthetics and artificats, cannot seem to bear to examine what those artifacts are modeled on: the intelligible order glimpsed by the eye of faith. Continue Reading »
The moral shelf life of pop cultural artifacts seems much shorter than ever before, and the criteria by which they might be judged far less predictable. Continue Reading »
Is liberalism giving way to something new? The most notable contemporary case for postliberalism, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, has four tacit assumptions: First, America is in decline. Second, liberalism is responsible for this decline. Third, liberalism is collapsing under the . . . . Continue Reading »