July 2, 2024
We tell ourselves myths in order to live with ourselves. Historians have the unpleasant responsibility of making that a little more difficult for us than it would otherwise be. This is a story about such a myth, and about the truth it obscures. Guatemala was not a country at peace in 1977. It was still...
Read MoreJune 14, 2024
There was little talk of what would happen next. There were wills being made out, insurance policies double-checked, and VHS tapes like “Cancer Doesn’t Scare Me” purchased. Holistic nutrition guides appeared around the house — vegetarianism was tried, an array of supplements bought from TV mail order suppliers. He drank more orange juice. Orange juice,...
Read MoreJune 13, 2024
In the 1980s, a football player visiting Shenandoah County’s Stonewall Jackson High School could be forgiven for wondering what century he’d entered when he took the field. His hosts’ cheerleaders would run up and down the sidelines waving the stars and bars. Hometown fans, some dressed in gray, would respond with the rebel yell. And...
Read MoreJune 12, 2024
Waiting for Two States feels like waiting for the Messiah. Okay, okay, but when? And meanwhile, what? Asking a civilization that is hemorrhaging – one whose civilians have no government whose primary concern is to protect them, and no place where they feel safe – to go about constructing a state is an exercise in...
Read MoreJune 10, 2024
I first met Sean Abley in the early-90s, as participants in the Chicago theatre scene. He had a theatre company called The Factory Theatre, where he put on shows he wrote and also directed. He was a phenom, and these shows (Bitches, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians: The Musical, Attack of the Killer B’s, Nuclear...
Read MoreMay 25, 2024
The word “unprecedented” in a headline always makes me grimace. Our fast-paced, click-obsessed mass media shirks historicity in the face of heat and hyperbole. Myopia reigns. One has to investigate to discover if precedent in fact exists. Even if the answer is no, even if the superlative was warranted, one has nonetheless been prompted to...
Read MoreMay 20, 2024
One of the craziest moments in American cinema comes in Ernst Lubitsch’s nervy unclassifiable To Be or Not to Be (1942), when Carole Lombard, playing a famous Polish actress, pays a call on a Nazi (Stanley Ridges) at Gestapo headquarters. She has to stall for time and pretend-submit to his seduction. He kisses her, and...
Read MoreMay 14, 2024
Genesis is a book of families, but it takes quite a while before the various siblings found within speak to each other. Husbands and wives speak to one another right off the bat, people fairly regularly talk to angels, and mothers and fathers address their children, but dozens of generations come and go before brothers...
Read MoreApril 2, 2024
“Were you culture-shocked?” is the question people often ask upon discovering that, at the age of twenty, I moved from Iran to the West. “Of course I was,” I usually say. “I still am.” But I suspect they mis-imagine the tribulations of that transition. Exchanging the Tehran of the 2000s, where I spent much of...
Read MoreApril 1, 2024
As a child in the Connecticut suburbs, John Margolies was fascinated by “the ugliest stuff in the world.” Coffee pots, pink flamingos, candlepin bowling, he liked a mess. Later, as an architecture critic and Warhol factory layabout — he briefly appeared in Warhol’s film Camp — that childhood fixation informed his professional eye: Margolies spurned...
Read MoreApril 1, 2024
Cowards do not skip generations. Neither do sociopaths, geniuses, hecatombs, or heroes. The brave are allotted in finite, equal amounts in every century and only ever account for a slim minority. Brutal slavery is not biblical, drawing and quartering is not medieval, and concentration camps did not come in and out of existence in the...
Read MoreApril 2, 2024
“What were you working on?” This is asked of every actor after any scene or monologue or acting exercise done at the Actors Studio sessions held twice a week in the old church on 432 West 44th Street, the Studio’s location since 1955. Two projects are presented each session. The members gather in the...
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