As the Olympic Torch Relay makes its way around the world, it is being met by significant human rights protests. To those who wish to protest, I would like to offer some suggestions.

1. Do Not Protest Against "China"
Do not protest against the Chinese people or against "China."...

Remember the excitement about the February 21, 2008, New York Times article that implied that John McCain may have been romantically involved with Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist 30 years his junior? There was a lot of righteous indignation about this invasion of McCain's privacy...and then the story faded away, soon...

Last November, Parade Magazine published an article I wrote about a visit I made to North Korea. Space in Parade is limited and the piece was actually a condensation of a longer report I had prepared. With the New York Philharmonic visiting North Korea, I thought the time might be...

This year 63 nations entered films in the foreign language category. I managed to see 49 of these films, including all five of the nominees. One evening between showings at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, an Academy member told me, "So many of the people here are so intent on finding...

The animated and live action short film awards are usually overlooked by the general public for the good reason that few people get a chance to see the nominees. Fortunately, this year all ten of the nominees are being distributed in theaters nationwide by Magnolia Pictures. Here are the

I have voted in every presidential primary since 1972, but because I live in California, my vote has never counted. By the time Californians got to vote, the candidate for each party had already been selected by voters in other states. When California moved up its primary to become part...

As you may have heard, NBC is reviving the 1990s TV hit American Gladiators. One of my sons attended the filming of one of the events and came back with this story...

During the taping of a preview interview, one of the contestants, an African-American woman named Tanji Johnson, was...

I was a cinema major at San Francisco State College when, in November 1967, my Film Theory professor, Ernest Callenbach, showed us a recently released cinéma vérité documentary directed by a friend of his, Frederick Wiseman, called Titicut Follies. For those unfamiliar with cinéma vérité, it is a form...

I came across a thread on the Internet in which one young contributor asked if Edith Piaf was her era's equivalent of Britney Spears or Madonna. Answer: no.

I saw the film La Vie en Rose in a packed theater in Los Angeles. As large as the crowd was,...

I was in the press interview room during the Oscars show. After the winners finished their photo ops and their TV appearances, they moved on to our room to answer questions from the representatives of the print media, web sites and radio. Here are a few notes from the evening....

I had planned to post my predictions for all the Oscar categories, but then I read David Carr's predictions in The New York Times and discovered that his were almost exactly the same as mine, including the more obscure awards like sound mixing and the shorts. So I decided to...

I first met Art Buchwald in Paris, when I was thirteen years old. Until I was twelve, I had never left California. Then my family started taking summers trips to Europe. We traveled by train from Los Angeles to New York and then by ship to Europe. Art Buchwald was...

Today a brutal dictator died of a heart attack. No, it wasn't Fidel Castro; it was someone far worse: Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan. As I prepare my annual article for Parade magazine on the "The World's 10 Worst Dictators," I have to admit that Niyazov (#8) is the one I...

The Iraq Study Group certainly got its 24 hours of media attention. But for all of the coverage, there is one really good recommendation that was all but ignored. This would be Recommendation #72, the introduction to which begins, "The public interest is not well served by the government's preparation,...

To hear some members of the mainstream media tell it, the results of the recent election were really bad news for the Democrats because most of the Republican incumbents who lost were moderates. I studied the list of the thirty or so Republican incumbents who were booted out of office....

At this point, it appears that the only reason U.S. troops are still in Iraq is that President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and their supporters can't figure out how to withdraw the troops without losing face. I have the solution to this problem. President Bush announces a primetime speech to the...

In a previous post, I addressed the question In a Democratic Year, Why are the Republicans Still Favored to Maintain Control of the Senate?. Although less common, it is also possible that a party can win the most votes for the House of Representatives and still not gain a...

Polls have consistently shown that two-thirds of the American people think the United States is going in the wrong direction. Because the Republicans, controlling as they do the Presidency and both houses of Congress, have completely determined this direction, it is not surprising that a significant majority would like to...

The New York Times ran a chart based on a survey by Pew Research Center of more than 23,000 Americans that compared party identification with who was president when each person reached the age of 20, the age at which most Americans begin to form their personal political beliefs....

For those who are interested in one of the more intriguing Academy Awards categories, Best Foreign Language Film, this year the Academy will use a new dual-committee nominating procedure. The first committee will be the usual Los Angeles-based group, made up of several hundred members, that has traditionally determined the...