- Justice League Action Figures
The team had been around since the 50s using the name Justice Society. However, the name was changed to the Justice league, in 1960 by the writer Gardner Fox; who was a huge fan of the National Football League and American baseball leagues....
- Ian Frazier: Remembering Justice Stevens.
During the two years I spent clerking for Justice John Paul Stevens—years I still consider the most memorable of my adult life—I came to know him not only as a brilliant legal mind but also as a human being. The majesty of the Supreme Court affects . . ....
- Books: “Supreme Power.”
In February, 1937, F.D.R., frustrated by a conservative-dominated Supreme Court that had struck down one New Deal law after another, tried to increase the number of Justices from nine to fifteen. “Tell your President, he has made a great mistake,” Justice Louis Brandeis said when told of . . ....
- Emily Nussbaum: “The Loving Story,” “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” on HBO.
HBO has two new documentaries, each dramatizing a miscarriage of justice. In January, the cable channel began airing Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” which was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary. It’s the capper to their nearly two-decade . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben Greenman: R. Kelly’s “Love Letter.”
paragraph class="noindent">Though this week marks the appearance of the first posthumous Michael Jackson album—thuddingly titled “Michael,” it contains mostly leftovers and left-outs that don’t do justice to Jackson’s canon—it’s better to let sleeping kings lie . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lauren Collins: The life of Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
On October 6th, at 10 A.M., Neal Katyal, an attorney for the Department of Justice, rose in front of the Supreme Court to argue the government’s position in the matter of United States v. Stevens. Standing at a mahogany lectern, surrounded by marble friezes of lawgivers—Draco . . ....
- Rebecca Mead: A memoir of McCarthyism, sixty years later.
Miriam Moskowitz, a retired math teacher who lives in Washington Township, New Jersey, has just published her first book, at the age of ninety-four. “Phantom Spies, Phantom Justice”—its comprehensive subtitle is “Elizabeth T. Bentley, Harry Gold, Roy M. Cohn, Irving H. Saypol, Judge Irving . . ....
- John Lahr: Nina Raine’s “Tribes” and Katori Hall’s “Hurt Village.”
8220;Silence is the unbearable repartee,” G. K. Chesterton once observed. In Nina Raine’s subtle and scintillating new play, “Tribes” (elegantly directed by David Cromer, at the Barrow Street Theatre), silence is the shadow that lends brilliance to the hubbub around the bohemian, intellectual upper . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Francis Spufford’s “Red Plenty,” review.
The first sign that this is not an orthodox history is the “cast” list up front, in which real people mingle with fictional ones. This hybrid approach, Spufford argues, befits the “fairytale” nature of his subject: the Soviet Union’s attempt—via a centralized . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Street Sweeper” review.
A short list of subjects addressed in this six-hundred-page novel would include the Holocaust, the civil-rights movement, Upton Sinclair, the American justice system, and the debilitating quest for academic tenure. That a major character is a history professor does not excuse the occasionally hectoring tone. The strands . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Obama and the left.
8220;All violent feelings have the same effect,” John Ruskin wrote, in one of his most famous essays. “They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic Fallacy.’ ” Ruskin published “Of the . . ....
- Justice League Action Figures – Superman
The Justice league's most famous member is without doubt Superman, affectionately known as the Man of steel. What is less commonly known is that Superman was probably the first of the modern-day superheroes. Writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster originally created the character in 1932. The character became famous after it appeared in action comics number one (June 1938)...
- Books: “My Father’s Fortune.”
8220;My father moved lightly over the earth, scarcely leaving a footprint, scarcely a shadow,” the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn writes, in a wry, unsentimental, but deeply felt family history, which doubles as a portrait of twentieth-century British middle-class life. Frayn’s father, a self . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Jorie Graham: “Cagnes-Sur-Mer 1950.”
I am the only one who ever lived who remembers
my mother’s voice in the particular shadow
cast by the sky-filled Roman archway
which darkens the stones on the down-sloping street
up which she has now come again suddenly.
How the archway and the voice and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Cantina’s Settling of Scores (1984)
I knew about this planning to kill Judge Finley, I knew about this myself; I was almost thirteen-years old now. It was dark out the evening cousin Cantina came over to talk to dad on the subject of killing the young judge. We just finished supper where there came a knocking at the front door. She was mad as a hornet, the boxer Joe somebody had killed-Otis Wilder Mather, it was a strange...
- Emily Nussbaum: “Parenthood,” “Husbands” reviews.
There’s a popular theory that the mark of a great TV show is that it dares you to reject it. The most ambitious dramas repel their audiences (“The Sopranos”) or confuse them (“The Wire”) or give them nightmares about bodies dissolving in acid (“ . . ....
- Ben Greenman: John Mellencamp’s “No Better Than This.”
paragraph class="noindent">John Mellencamp’s new album, “No Better Than This,” is his twenty-first studio record, but it’s also a début of sorts. It’s his first album for Rounder Records, the independent roots label, and it is, on the . . ....
- Books: “No Such Thing as Silence.”
In this concise survey, Gann, a composer and music critic, examines John Cage’s famously noteless composition “4′33″” from origins to afterlife. He lucidly catalogues the “specifically American mix” of influences—Duchamp, Zen, Erik Satie, Thoreau, Robert Rauschenberg—that fed . . ....
- Books: “Bird Cloud.”
Proulx’s memoir chronicles her years-long quest to build a “final home” in the harsh Wyoming landscape that has provided a setting for much of her fiction. The project is plagued by obstacles, and Proulx’s enthusiasm is fickle. “I still do not know . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Bird Cloud.”
Proulx’s memoir chronicles her years-long quest to build a “final home” in the harsh Wyoming landscape that has provided a setting for much of her fiction. The project is plagued by obstacles, and Proulx’s enthusiasm is fickle. “I still do not know . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “William Golding.”
Carey’s thorough and illuminating biography, the first of Golding, also serves as a crucial introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s output. Golding’s novels, which include “The Inheritors,” “Pincher Martin,” and “Darkness Visible,” have always stood in the . . ....
- John Lahr: “All’s Well That Ends Well” and “Measure for Measure”
8220;The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,” one of the courtiers in “All’s Well That Ends Well” says in a piece of throwaway brilliance that reveals Shakespeare’s argument and his theatrical game. The ever-changing . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Adam Gopnik: “The Lord of the Rings,” “Twilight,” and young-adult fantasy books.
At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict . . ....
- Books: “The Hidden Reality.”
This often mind-stretching survey distills research in such fields as cosmology, quantum mechanics, and string theory that has yielded variations on a similar idea: that our universe, once thought to be singular and all-encompassing, may be just one of many, perhaps innumerably many. Within this formulation, Greene writes . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Hidden Reality.”
This often mind-stretching survey distills research in such fields as cosmology, quantum mechanics, and string theory that has yielded variations on a similar idea: that our universe, once thought to be singular and all-encompassing, may be just one of many, perhaps innumerably many. Within this formulation, Greene writes . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Betrayal” review.
The effects of repression replace those of deprivation in this sequel to Dunmore’s “The Siege,” which was set during the long siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. It’s now 1952, and Anna and Andrei have made a happy life for themselves and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: “John Carter,” “The Deep Blue Sea” reviews.
The season of quarter-billion-dollar movies has kicked off with a mess. Andrew Stanton’s “John Carter,” based on an ancient novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs (written at about the same time as “Tarzan”), begins with a battle on Mars, or Barsoom, as Burroughs . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Tad Friend: John Logan’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus.”
In a basement conference room at Bauman Rare Books, on Madison Avenue, two men sat near a bust of Tolstoy. They wore matching bibliophile regalia—gray sweater and spectacles—but while Erik DuRon, the store’s manager, maintained a dignified slouch, John Logan, the playwright and screenwriter . . . (Subscription required.)...
