John Lyons
3,308 words
John Lyons
Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir
Sydney: Harpers Collins Publishers, 2017
Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism’s Toughest Assignment
Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2021 (more…)
Robert Cuccioli as Ben Rumson in Jon Marans’ Paint Your Wagon
2,260 words
The Western dominated American pop culture until the early 1970s, when it suddenly winked out like an aging athlete. TV was infested with Westerns. Jonathan Winters once complained that though he loved Westerns, he didn’t like “fifteen of them in a row.” It sure seemed that way. (more…)
Martin Kosleck as Joseph Goebbels in Confessions of a Nazi Spy
3,871 words
All installments in this series available here
If you have ever watched the History Channel for longer than five minutes, you have probably heard this quote from Hitler: “If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” (more…)
2,570 words
When the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli received an anonymous solution to a difficult problem he’d set in 1696, he saw at once who had sent it. The solver was Isaac Newton, he said, because he knew ex ungue leonem — “the lion by his claw.” (more…)
Georg Gyssling and Leni Riefenstahl
4,606 words
All installments in this series available here
Over the last few years, there has been some controversy about the influence of China over Hollywood. The claim is not that China is secretly controlling Hollywood, as the Alex Jones types have been insisting, but that Hollywood has been increasingly tailoring their films to meet the approval of the Chinese government in order to gain access to the massive Chinese market. Most commentators, especially liberal ones, consider this a bad thing. (more…)
2,675 words
Down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. (more…)
3,495 words
Tucker Carlson recently ruffled some feathers for calling WWI “the Iraq War of its day.” I’m not sure what these people were offended by. I think there are just people who get outraged by the things Tucker Carlson says first before coming up with a reason why (more…)
Phil Eiger Newmann, Killjoy Was Here, 2020.
1,642 words
The nights grow long and dark and cold. I’ve often suspected that Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s are merely three sedatives we administer ourselves to collectively brace for the gaping black icy void in the months that follow when the sun never seems to shine and the plants refuse to grow. (more…)
2,246 words
Storytelling (2001) is the most politically incorrect movie I have ever seen. Indeed, it is so un-PC that it could never have been made today.
Director Todd Solondz is a really sick guy. His films Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, Palindromes, and Life During Wartime can justly be accused of fixating on bullying, rape, pedophilia, abortion, suicide, and murder. (more…)
Jay-Z and Rick Rubin.
2,237 words
Who is Rick Rubin?
If you asked in the early part of his career, he was a member of the provocative hardcore punk band, The Pricks. He would also stress that he was a nobody. Rubin’s purpose for being in the Pricks was, functionally, to piss off his rich Jewish father; (more…)
1,436 words
This morning I woke up to the news of another casualty in the culture war. A dusty, 20-year-old skit of late-night comedian and SNL alum Jimmy Fallon donning brown makeup and a wig to mimic African racial features, in a Chris Rock impersonation, went viral. And just like clockwork, Fallon is on Twitter performing the self-flagellation ritual that is demanded of him by the anti-racism Sanhedrin. (more…)
