Category: things

There are so many brilliant, disarmingly beautiful moments in WALL•E, I want to watch it – or at least the first chapter – a few more times to begin to understa...

Almost. Orangutan escapes pen at US zoo – Zoo officials say the animal was easily sedated and captured.

Great tits cope well with warming update. it’s a thing of elegance, indeed. two days after noting the above, the headline – just the headline – was on Boi...

There is only a single scene in Iron Man where the movie threatens to become a lie about advanced American firepower and the power (right?) it grants us to poli...

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), like Schindler’s List, succeeds in making history personal. Like the Spielberg film, it brings the viewer int...

A few weeks ago I watched a late-stage Soviet movie and wondered if any movies made henceforth will ever be as alien to anyone else as this one was to me. And t...

The blog post in which this game is announced to the world has two comments, whereas a recent post about a dead child actor on the web site of an ogre has 198. ...

The band Battles on the BBC television show Later! The entire segment is full of clever, rewarding details like the decision to point a camera down at the sole ...

I’m very, very late to this party, but, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is an excellent movie. Warm, generous, fluid.

Juno. As it was ending, I thought, “Well, it’s cute.” On the way out of the theater, Ana called it “cutesy,” which, to me, nails i...

Far From Heaven is the best Todd Haynes movie? I loved it. Beautiful, complicated and simple. Emotionally stirring and intellectually expansive. A Living Imitat...

The Science of Sleep may be Michel Gondry’s best attempt at a movie, yet. For all of its trickery, it’s very honest. I wonder if the protagonist is ...

Lejos de mi tierra, by Vicente Fernandez, may be the best song written about contemporary Mexican immigration to the United States.

WNYC’s Radio Lab is my favorite radio program and a gold standard for pop intellectualism. Here are links to mp3 files of each episode, should you be able...

The Wire. Totally. Believe. The. Hype. And then some.

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 u...