Review: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch
It’s been a fair while between drinks for Donna Tartt. Her previous novel, The Little Friend, came out in 2002; The Goldfinch, her latest (and, as I will argue below, certainly her greatest to...
Category: Themes
Water is a Human Right: Detroit Turns Off the Faucets On Poor People
It's not easy to explain what is going on in Detroit right now. The city is in the depths of complicated bankruptcy proceedings to solve financial situation that goes back decades, and is currently...
Is Robin Thicke the Male Equivalent of a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend?
There is, perhaps, no more reliable generator of schadenfreude in pop music right now than Robin Thicke. In the past year, he’s gone from a chart-topping artist to a public laughingstock: There was...
An Honest Look at Sexuality: Masters of Sex Returns
Masters of Sex is back on Showtime as of Sunday, with a doozy of an episode in “Parallax.” The Showtime drama is one among many shows competing for the attention of viewers suddenly drawn to...
Review: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book
“Even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered…” The winner of Australia’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, was announced last week – it went to Evie...
Russia’s NATO Fears
In a muscular speech on March 18th before a joint session of the Russian parliament announcing the annexation of Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked a deep sense of grievance about the...
Review: Extant
Making the hop from film to television seems to be increasingly common these days, so it’s no great surprise to see Halle Berry headlining CBS’s latest sci-fi offering, Extant. The show premiered...
The Ten Books You Need To Read Before You Die!
There has been so many books published over the years in both classic and contemporary genres that it is so hard to know what is valuable or interesting to read and what is not. In this article I aim...
The 6 Best—and 6 Worst—Things About 3-Day Holiday Weekends
There are a lot of things to love about three-day holiday weekends, especially during the summer—spending time outside (or inside if you live in a place that gets triple-digit temperatures in...
Does Hashtag Activism Actually Work?
On April 14 about 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped by the Boko Haram terrorist organisation in Nigeria. The girls, committing the heinous crime of desiring an education, were taken by the Islamist...