The filmmaker has a blind spot. Asked recently for his favorite heroic moments in film, director Martin Scorsese offered ten examples-- and not one involved heroic action taken by a woman. Not one. Heroes, according to the director, are cast only with males. Really?

But...

Is Hollywood, which prides itself on instructing Society on things moral---about bad wars like Vietnam and Iraq, about civil rights, about corruption in business and politics---now taking instruction from Society?

In the matter of the film Zero Dark Thirty and the moral issue of torture, it seems so---and...

Devotees of the phenomenally popular PBS series Downton Abbey -- and we are legion, spanning the globe -- are devastated with the death, in the final seconds of this season's finale, of Matthew Crawley, heir to Downton, new husband to Lady Mary, and even newer father to his...

Ever since the massacre of the innocents in Newtown, Conn., almost two months ago, the image of those children -- terrified, alone at the last -- has stayed with me, as it has with many, many other conscientious Americans. I think also of the six teachers and school personnel who...

'Tis the week before Christmas, but instead of good cheer, there's much despondency in the land. The slaughter of the innocents -- 20 children, ages six and seven -- and of six adults who staffed their school in Newtown, Connecticut, has plunged the nation in sorrow.

This despondency I...

Even with a highly satisfactory result to the 2012 presidential campaign, in which President Barack Obama was returned to office, like many Americans I was exhausted with the endlessness and ferocity of the campaign. I needed, badly, something completely different -- like two weeks in London and a deep draft...

Oh, what might have been..... Consider what Mitt Romney might have been---as candidate, as president.....

While I am very pleased Barack Obama was re-elected, still---for the good of our troubled country---I wanted to see Mr. Romney acquit himself better.

At this historical moment, the grand American experiment balancing capitalism...

It started within hours of the polls closing, and with no let-up in campaign ferocity: the interpreting of the 2012 presidential election and The Meaning Of It All (see here, here, here, here, and here). For Democrats, it's the Renaissance;...

Dear Undecided: Welcome to the Main Event -- the 2012 presidential election!

Lots of people have been wondering about you (here). Some think you've just been playing coy with us political aficionados, for the attention. Others call you "low-information" (and not as a compliment). Comedian Stephen Colbert...

America the Exceptional.

We Americans take pride in the idea and the reality of America as the exceptional nation, though that exceptionalism is variously defined. The left defines it in terms of our democratic and humanist ideals and the responsibility to set a good example in the world (thus...

When a great playwright warns against making theater of a particular enterprise, we might lend him our ears.

Arthur Miller, creator of the timeless dramas Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, warned against treating politics as mere theater, as spectacle only. Writing about the Bush-Gore presidential race...

Well, of course: Mitt Romney would not apologize for implying that 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes are irresponsible moochers, which he did at a closed fundraiser for the super-rich in Florida and which, caught on secret video, ate the news cycle...

So, the 2012 presidential campaign has turned "nasty" (see here, here, here, here, and here). Both teams scream foul, the commentariat and the Sunday talk shows replay "a-nasty-campaign-gets-nastier" theme, the September cover of The Atlantic features Barack Obama...

Where is Eliot Ness when we need him?

Eliot Ness was the incorruptible U.S. Treasury agent who went after Al Capone, the Prohibition gangster, and brought him down -- not with a gun but with the law (for income tax evasion). He was the implacable face of the...

America is in deep trouble -- economic, political, cultural, moral. Yet few public figures are speaking honestly to us about our fallen state, much less pointing the way upward.

Leave it to a fictional character to do the job -- brilliantly.

In the opening sequence of the new HBO series...

One might expect that a play that had won all the big prizes -- the Pulitzer, the UK's Olivier, and now the Tony award for best play -- would have some relation to reality, would reflect some home truth.

Not so Bruce Norris'

Before Mad Men solidifies, at the close of its fifth season, as the signature of the '60s, a cultural marker of the era (see here, here, and here), a dissent:

Not all of us wanted the "glam" life of Madison Avenue;...

Recently two respected think-tank scholars dropped the scholarly distance and performed a major public service by stating what's become obvious but remained unspoken because of the bitter partisan divide.

In an op-ed with a title that telegraphs its point and its authors' frustration -- "Let's Just Say It:...

"You were lonely? But, I was lonely too!"

No mere words, this was an "ultra-violet moment" -- a moment when the world halts on its axis, lights bump up to surgical brightness, masks are dropped, words fulfill their precise meaning, and Truth is illuminated -- finally -- in our case,...

When I first encountered the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska -- the Nobel laureate from Poland who died recently at age 88 -- it was love at first read. It was the early '80s; I was browsing in a bookstore when my eye luckily fell on these...