The Town: Ben Affleck’s redemption
After losing the bad guys in a claustrophobic car chase Special Agent Frawley is pissed. “This is the not-f*cking-around crew,” he rants at his men, “So get me something that looks like a...
Category: Themes
Editor’s Diary: Bunin’s legend of the fall
Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin once wrote a brilliant story that is the very definition of "shot." In it, a nobleman riding alone sometime in autumn is nearly run down by a drunk peasant on his horse. The...
Enter Janelle Monáe
In my last piece about music for Global Comment, I bemoaned the state of contemporary rnb and hiphop, which has few bright spots as far as I'm concerned—a malaise I should hasten to add it shares...
The Muslim Question: It’s not about “decency”
As a Pakistani-American who was raised Muslim, I've been abstaining from weighing in on the unrestrained anti-Muslim crusade that has recently metastasized to untenable proportions worldwide, partly...
The death of Liza Fomkina
Liza Fomkina and her aunt - a woman suffering from a disability - went missing on September 13 after taking two dogs on a walk in Orekhovo-Zuevo, a town in the Moscow region. The aunt's body was...
How “F” fails
“Education, education, education.” New Labour’s old mantra rings hollow to English teacher Robert Anderson. This venerable warhorse stalks his classroom with the kind of “Dark sarcasm”...
The Big C: So this is liberating?
The Big C is making quite a splash in cable programming. Laura Linney stars as Cathy Jamison, a high school history teacher diagnosed with Stage-IV melanoma. Cathy eschews chemotherapy and opts not...
Editor’s Diary: Hate is still hate
Politics in the U.S. has reached a level of toxicity that those of us who worked the campaign trail during the 2008 elections couldn't have imagined. Foolishly, perhaps, my friends and I on the Obama...
Activism in America: We need a new ideology
It's one of my most deeply held beliefs: nothing has undermined the left more since the fall of the Soviet Union than the inability to coalesce around an ideological structure to help us fight global...
Shonen Knife at Bottom of the Hill – so damn nice
After nearly 20 years in the business, Shonen Knife are still neither bored nor boring. The punk/pop band from Osaka has always been a trio, but there have been quite a few lineup changes over the...