It was an ordeal that helped shape the dominant view of one of the richest periods in cinema. In 1933 Siegfried Kracauer and his wife fled Germany, and in 1941, after harrowing efforts to escape France, they arrived in New York. That’s where the Museum of Modern Art’s first film curator, Iris Barry, found Kracauer [...]
Archive for November, 2010
More Than Moodiness
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Premonition at Vicksburg
Posted in History on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Vicksburg, Miss., Nov. 3, 1860 Antebellum Vicksburg During the last days of the campaign, while Lincoln stayed close to home and held his tongue, another man who would soon be president played somewhat less coy. For six full weeks, Senator Jefferson Davis had been barnstorming through Mississippi on behalf of the Southern Democrats. The state [...]
Hegel on Wall Street
Posted in Other on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
As of today, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, the emergency bailouts born in the financial panic of 2008, is no more. Done. Finished. Kaput. Last month the Congressional Oversight Panel issued a report assessing the program. It makes for grim reading. Once it is conceded that government intervention was necessary and generally [...]
The All-American Confidence Man
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
The gifted grifter who inspired Damon Runyon’s Sky Masterson was a fake from start to finish Nearly everythingabout Titanic Thompson was fake. The bottlecap that he would bet you he could toss the length of a city block had a quarter nestled inside, which he’d put there while you weren’t looking. The caddie with whom [...]
Why I Mourn the Decline of Whistling
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
On the one hand it was a declaration of liberty, on the other it was a kind of mating call. One night during World War II, on leave in London, I penetrated the blackout to see a show at the London Hippodrome called “The Lisbon Story.” I forget what it was about, I forget who [...]
Speech and Harm
Posted in Living on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
As every public figure knows, there are certain words that can not be uttered without causing shock or offense. These words, commonly known as “slurs,” target groups on the basis of race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status and sundry other demographics. Many of us were reminded of the impact of such speech in [...]
Lincoln Wins. Now What?
Posted in History on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Nov. 7, 1860 A cartoon from the campaign. Yesterday, the start of the most exciting day in the history of Springfield, Ill., could not wait for the sun. At 3 a.m., somebody got Election Day started with volleys of cannon fire, and after that there were incessant and spontaneous eruptions of cheering and singing all [...]
The Cheat: The Greens Party
Posted in Living on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
There was a party of dudes from Montana sitting at a table in Vij’s in Vancouver, British Columbia, getting ready to graze. They were businessmen, in the city for a conference, and the hotel had sent them out to South Granville Street to wait for a table, for Vij’s takes no reservations and never has. [...]
Desire in the Twilight of Life
Posted in Living on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Despite the stereotypes and bad jokes, intimacy is alive and well in our aging population. And it’s time to get comfortable with it. Elinor Carucci, Grandparents’ Kiss, 1998. From the book Closer, Chronicle books, 2002. A colleague of mine, a geriatric social worker, likes to tell a story about the time one of his clients, [...]
Against Rebellion
Posted in History on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Why did some colonials remain loyal to the king? Thomas B. Allen begins “Tories” with an anecdote that the author apparently considers a useful way of illustrating his theme. A column of American rebel soldiers was marching through a Virginia town in 1777, he tells us, when a shoemaker rushed out of his shop and [...]
Mysteries Carved in Stone
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
The name “Olmec” (or “rubber people”) was given to the oldest-known culture in the Americas almost 2,000 years after that culture had disappeared, and was accepted by scholars only in 1932. We have no idea what these people of what is now eastern Mexico, just inland from the Gulf at its southernmost point, called themselves. [...]
The Backdating Embarrassment
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
How did a meaningless violation of accounting rules become the crime the of century? An array of influential friends urged leniency for Bruce Karatz in his stock-option backdating sentencing last week, including former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and philanthropist Eli Broad. But these personages weren’t the reason Judge Otis D. Wright II rejected prosecutors’ [...]
Gossart’s Journey
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
The Metropolitan Museum’s magisterial retrospective of Jan Gossart is the sort of exhibition that, one often hears, will surely be the last of its kind. Insurance has become too expensive (the theory goes), transport too perilous, and major institutions too leery of lending their wares. I first heard this claim with regard to MoMA’s great [...]
Forget any ‘Right to Be Forgotten’
Posted in Computers, Law on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Don’t count on government to censor information about you online. The stakes keep rising in the debate over online privacy. Last week, the Obama administration floated the idea of a privacy czar to regulate the Internet, and the European Union even concocted a new “right to be forgotten” online. The proposed European legislation would give [...]
The Power To Control
Posted in Computers on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Is Internet freedom threatened more by dominant companies or by the government’s efforts to hem them in? In the early days of the radio industry, in the 1920s, almost anyone could become a broadcaster. There were few barriers to entry, basically just some cheap equipment to acquire. The bigger broadcasters soon realized that wealth creation [...]
‘The Fighter’: Why Movies and Boxing Go Together
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
It’s a little surprising that Mark Wahlberg hasn’t made a boxing movie until now. He’s one of those celebrities you always see at ringside during the big TV boxing matches. His forte is playing humble, gutsy tough guys. As a former bodybuilder and underwear model, he’s never been shy about displaying his physique on camera. [...]
How (and Where) Lincoln Won
Posted in History on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
The Civil War was the largest, bloodiest conflict fought on American soil, but today its geography — from elections and secession to the back-and-forth of military struggle — is often obscure. This article is the first in a series in which Susan Schulten, a historian at the University of Denver, uses maps to illuminate the [...]
Acquittal in terror case shows justice system’s strength
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
THE STUNNING verdict in the first civilian trial of a Guantanamo detainee is an embarrassment for the Obama administration, but it should not deter officials from considering federal court prosecutions for others being held at the U.S. naval base. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was acquitted of 284 of the 285 charges lodged against him for his [...]
Never Again?
Posted in Conflicts and wars on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Giulio Meotti’s book about Palestinian terrorism tells a truth many Westerners don’t want to hear. “A New Shoa: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism,” is a hard read. Not because it is badly written; it is clear, precise, and eloquent. It is a hard read because it is deeply moving—many times, I had [...]
Don’t touch my junk
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Other on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Ah, the airport, where modern folk heroes are made. The airport, where that inspired flight attendant did what everyone who’s ever been in the spam-in-a-can crush of a flying aluminum tube – where we collectively pretend that a clutch of peanuts is a meal and a seat cushion is a “flotation device” – has always [...]
No You Can’t
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Is genius a simple matter of hard work? Not a chance What do you think of when you hear the word “genius”? Most of us, I suspect, picture a fellow in a white coat who squints into a microscope, twiddles a knob, and says, “Eureka! I’ve found the cure for cancer!” More often than not, [...]
Hearing the Returns with Mr. Lincoln
Posted in History on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
In 1860, a cub reporter named Samuel R. Weed scored the assignment of a lifetime when his St. Louis newspaper sent him to spend Election Day with the man who might become America’s president. Surprisingly, no one else had thought of it, and Weed arrived to find a relaxed Abraham Lincoln, greeting him “as calmly [...]
She Talks a Lot, He Listens a Little
Posted in Living on November 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Marianne Ham was so excited when she recently visited Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan ruins in Peru, that she pulled out her cellphone on the top of the mountain and called her husband back home in Huntingdon Valley, Pa. She wanted to share the experience with him and described the stunning views. When she was [...]
To Run or Not to Run, That Is the Question
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
It’s only Thanksgiving 2010, but some GOP politicians must decide if they want a shot at the presidency. All eyes have been on Capitol Hill, but let’s take a look at the early stages of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. This week the papers have been full of sightings—Newt and Huckabee are in [...]
Obama’s Air Guitar
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
The danger of America’s will to weakness. Lately in the news: Beijing provokes clashes with the navies of both Indonesia and Japan as part of a bid to claim the South China Sea. Tokyo is in a serious diplomatic row with Russia over the South Kuril islands, a leftover dispute from 1945. There are credible [...]
One Writer’s Impassioned Journey
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
The work stands between the heyday of prose poetry in late 19th-century France and the form’s resurgence in the 1980s. The term “sui generis” is used so often that its impact has been diminished. But some artworks truly are in a class of their own, towering over other examples of the same form even [...]
Investigators Zero in on Massive Art Forgery Scandal
Posted in Arts and Entertainment, Law on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
The Hippy and the Expressionists Beltracchi briefly tried to make a go of it as an artist before turning to forgery. This piece is called “Durchdringung, Melatenerstr. Nr. 4″ (Penetration, Melatener Street, No. 4). Investigators estimate total damages at more than €15 million. Over the past 15 years, the art world has been amazed at [...]
Head-Stompers, Wrench-Swingers and Wide Awakes
Posted in History on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
New York, Nov. 2, 1860 Young Republicans with axes! New York firemen run amok! Welcome to election week, 1860. Hurled brickbats, smashed glass and howled curses were the soundtrack of American electoral politics a century and a half ago. The oratorical eloquence that most people today associate with the 19th century — those resonant fanfares [...]
Trying to Show the Unknowable
Posted in History, Literature on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
The ordeals, strategies, problems and triumphs of Holocaust literature. ‘A novel about Auschwitz,” Elie Wiesel once wrote, “is not a novel, or it is not about Auschwitz.” The testimony of Holocaust survivors, he seemed to imply, is inherently true, while literary representations of the Holocaust are, at some level, inherently false. Of course, it is [...]
Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Welfare Kings
Posted in Religion on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
There is no precedent in Jewish history for a whole community devoting itself to Torah scholarship. In Israel, where modernity coexists uneasily with tradition, hand-wringing about the country’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority is a national pastime. Cloistered in poor towns and neighborhoods, exempted from conscription into the military and surviving largely off government handouts, the black-hatted [...]
