- Hilton Als: James Rasin’s documentary, “Beautiful Darling.”
Candy Darling was a movie star’s dream of what a movie star should look like. Born in Forest Hills, Queens, in the nineteen-forties, Candy was raised as James Slattery in Massapequa Park, Long Island, during the nineteen-fifties, when the world wasn’t exactly ready for . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Cain” review.
It should come as no surprise to readers of Saramago, who died last year, that the lowercase “god” in his final novel is an arbitrary, malicious tyrant. In a winkingly blasphemous retelling of the Old Testament, Cain observes the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, wreaks havoc on Noah . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Surowiecki: Obama, jobs, and the G.O.P.
There is no truer truism in American politics than James Carville’s catchphrase from the 1992 election “It’s the economy, stupid.” When people discuss Barack Obama’s current approval rating, which is at its lowest level ever, they may invoke his supposed lack of . . ....
- Sasha Frere-Jones: The Shins’ forthright melodies on “Port of Morrow.”
There is an imperfect but viable analogy to be made between the Shins’ leader and songwriter, James Mercer, and Mark Zuckerberg. Indie rock is James Mercer’s field; the Internet, Zuckerberg’s. Both men are shy and unassuming, without naturally dramatic personalities or excessive charisma. Anyone who . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Hilton Als: Toni Morrison’s “Desdemona,” at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival.
Historically speaking, the stage is a notoriously difficult space for novelists to fill. Henry James is a famous example of a brilliant writer whose dreams of footlight glory were not meant to be. And while Saul Bellow’s “The Last Analysis” is a lovely play, it’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Anthony Lane: M.R. James’s “Collected Ghost Stories.”
The name of Montague Rhodes James is not widely recognized in America, and there will be little fellow-feeling for the world he chose to inhabit. Indeed, it seems as remote as a cold, unvisitable planet, viewed from afar. James was born in southeast England in 1862. His father, Herbert . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Bond Seamaster
The, james bond seamaster, watch comes with a big heritage. Ian Fleming began to write the James Bond series of books in 1952. The first actor was Sean Connery as the inimitable James, James Bond....
- Allison Silverman: Et Tu, Brooklyn?
I recently illustrated a Bible with dinosaur pictures. I do provocative stuff like that all the time. Adam and Eve are triceratops. Cain is a velociraptor. But the best one is Job. I showed the moment after he’s lost his money, his health, and his children, when Job . . ....
- Paul Slansky: “Oops”: The Debates Quiz.
Match the candidate with the food metaphor that he or she deployed.
1. Herman Cain.
2. Newt Gingrich.
3. Mitt Romney.
4. Michele Bachmann.
(a) On Obamacare: “You show up and say, ‘I’d like a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.’ They give you a Quarter Pounder . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben Greenman: James Brown’s “The Singles, Volume Eight: 1972-73.”
paragraph class="noindent">Since his death, in 2006, James Brown has become one of the most repackaged artists in history, thanks in no small part to an ambitious series of double-disk sets released by Hip-O Select. The sets have looked at Brown’s full singles catalogue, year . . ....
- David Denby: James Stewart in “The Far Country,” at Film Forum.
James Stewart, America’s favorite romantic and idealistic young man, changed remarkably after the war; he became angry, tough, and self-involved, and wound up, in 1958, as a malevolent obsessive in Hitchcock’s masterpiece “Vertigo.” Along the way, Stewart made five great Westerns with the . . ....
- Hilton Als: “Early Plays” by Eugene O’Neill, “CQ/CX,” “Rx” reviews.
The director Richard Maxwell’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Early Plays” (at St. Ann’s Warehouse) has the supreme realism of a dream. It is happening, and sometimes you don’t want it to happen, but you’re powerless to . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Bond Movies
Inspired by the novels of Ian Fleming, a series of British spy films were released in the 60s are still being produced. They are the James Bond movies. They are about the fictional M16 agent by name James Bond, his code name being 007. This is one of the longest running film series in the history of cinema with an ongoing production from 1962 to 2008, with a short hiatus between 1989 and...
- James Surowiecki: New cars, housing, and economic recovery.
The story of America’s recovery from the recession has been one of dashed hopes. In early 2010, and again early last year, the economy looked as if it might be starting to grow under its own power, only to slow markedly in the months that followed. So what . . ....
- James Surowiecki: The shrinking middle of the consumer market.
Apple’s launch of the iPad next week is a gamble in more ways than one. To start with, it’s obviously a bet that there are millions of people looking for a new way to surf the Web, watch movies, and read magazines. But it’s . . ....
- Books: “Caleb’s Crossing.”
In previous novels, Brooks has conjured Restoration England, Civil War America, and Europe during the Spanish Inquisition. Here she filters the early Colonial era through the eyes of a restless minister’s daughter growing up on the island known today as Martha’s Vineyard. Despite her father’ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Surowiecki: Why politicians are spooking the markets.
It seems crazy: the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia holds an election, and Americans’ 401(k)s go haywire. But that’s not a bad shorthand description of what’s happened to the stock market over the past few weeks. What links the two is the . . ....
- Dana Goodyear: The Return of James Cameron.
The director James Cameron is six feet two and fair, with paper-white hair and turbid blue-green eyes. He is a screamer—righteous, withering, aggrieved. “Do you want Paul Verhoeven to finish this motherfucker?” he shouted, an inch from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face, after the . . ....
- James Surowiecki: The crisis in customer service.
American workers are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. That’s the clear message of flight attendant Steven Slater’s emergence as a “working-class hero,” after he threw his job away with a tirade against passengers and a . . ....
- James Wood: The novels of Paul Auster.
Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short passage from Rousseau’s “Confessions.” A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was beaten to . . ....
- David Remnick: Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and the flawed Republican candidates.
Sometime in the future, when a twenty-first-century Gibbon searches for a moment to use as a starting point for a chronicle of American decline, he or she might want to alight on the late-October and early-November days of 2011. Not that there is much to be . . ....
- Magic Glasses
The first time James and Jenny met was on a concert. At that time, James was the performer on the stage, and Jenny was one of the audiences below. James showed his passion and talent in front of the crowd, being loved and adored by thousands of hundreds of fans....
- Hilton Als: Taylor Mac, at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
The performer, playwright, and star Taylor Mac is too young to have appeared in James McCourt’s essential 2003 book, “Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture: 1947-1985,” but, should there be a subsequent volume, Mac would certainly be front and center. Ever since . . ....
- James Surowiecki: Why the health care bill is worth passing.
Reforming America’s health-insurance system was never going to be an easy task, given people’s natural aversion to change (not to mention Republicans’ aversion to doing anything that might help Barack Obama). But what’s made the task even more difficult is that American . . ....
- John Lahr: Introduction to Eugene O’Neill’s “Exorcism.”
Before Eugene O’Neill, America had entertainment; after him, it had drama. Born in 1888, the second son of James O’Neill, one of the most celebrated romantic actors of his day, the young O’Neill was a Princeton dropout, a feckless father, a pie-eyed sailor . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Surowiecki: Steve Jobs’s perfectionism and Apple’s success.
As seemingly everyone on the planet knows, Steve Jobs’s defining quality was perfectionism. The development of the Macintosh, for instance, took more than three years, because of Jobs’s obsession with detail. He nixed the idea of an internal fan, because he thought it was noisy and . . ....
- James Wood: Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child” review.
Most of the prose writers acclaimed for “writing beautifully” do no such thing; such praise is issued comprehensively, like the rain on the just and the unjust. Mostly, what’s admired as beautiful is ordinary; or sometimes it’s too obviously beautiful, feebly fine—what . . ....
- Dana Goodyear: James Franco’s dizzying art project.
Last week, James Franco—the actor, artist, poet, and, starting in the fall, Ph.D. candidate in the English department at Yale—staged a piece of performance art at the Pacific Design Center, in Los Angeles, a huge blue-and-green compound on Melrose Avenue. “Soap at MOCA . . ....
