The American version of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on the Fox Network is like a blackened hamburger made out of AAA filet mignon. The footage is ugly, the exposition clumsy and obvious – like a drunk repeating himself. The opening sequence reveals the confused overkill that mars the entire operation: where the British series used [...]
Deadwood, which turns out to be about America and Shakespeare, ends badly. It’s as if the producers found out the show had been canceled with two episodes left in the third season and then devoted those remaining episodes to killing the show slowly so the audience wouldn’t miss it when it was gone. What a [...]
Jonathan Chait: Short-term fluctuations, often driven by events beyond the control of the party in power, are inevitable. So the way to win is not to win every election but to control the terms of the debate. The conservative movement’s signal triumph is to have done just this, reshaping what is possible in American politics [...]
The new Queens of the Stone Age album, Era Vulgaris, is excellent. Like a great dessert, it is slightly perverse, simple in its presentation and complex in its elaboration. Turnin on the Screw, the opening track, has a lengthy bridge that is spun cotton candy: both mindless and elaborate. Josh Homme is one of the [...]
While reading Distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs I thought: what if, by chance, there had been no such collision? Would they have evolved into something more like “us”? The dinosaurs had a good run: 62 million years. What would another 50 million have done for them? Then again, you could say they never [...]