Let’s Rush To Judgment!: ‘Jack And Jill’

Hey, it’s Adam Sandler! Talking funny! In drag! And Katie Holmes! And women so big they collapse horses! It’s safe to say that Jack And Jill does not represent the next step in Adam Sandler’s effort to be taken seriously as a leading man or a real actor. (Remember when he wanted to be a [...]

With A Spotlight On Jobs, Time To Talk About Cancer

Mitchell Berger is a retired lawyer and an editorial consultant on NPR Double Take ‘Toons. After seeing a friend in the hospital yesterday, I heard that Steve Jobs had resigned as Apple’s CEO. Both my friend and I have have the same kind of cancer Mr. Jobs has — but neither of us has pancreatic [...]

After The Rapture, Who Are ‘The Leftovers’?

Earlier this year, California-based preacher Harold Camping announced that the beginning of the end of the world would take place on May 21, 2011. The date passed by with no apparent rapture, and Camping became the butt of many late-night talk show jokes. But what if the rapture did actually occur? That’s the premise of [...]

1-800-EARWORM: The Commercials That You Can’t Forget

I had been writing about Charlie’s Angels a bit recently, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, I guess, when I found myself on the Metro into work the other day with a related theme running through my head. But it wasn’t the theme from the old TV show. It was the theme from the old [...]

How Steve Jobs Changed The Way We Listen

I find the news of Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple’s CEO particularly sad. In some ways, I feel something like I felt when The Beatles broke up. Sure, I’d always have the band’s music, but damn, what a special time. What special chemistry. It will never be the same. We listen to music in [...]

Foreclosures A Third Of Sales; Mortgage Rates Rise

Foreclosures made up roughly one-third of all home sales this spring. While that’s a smaller share of sales from the previous quarter, it’s six times the percentage of foreclosures in a healthy housing market. Meanwhile, fixed mortgage rates edged up this week from their lowest levels in decades. Foreclosure sales, which include homes purchased after [...]

What Should The U.S. Do Next In Libya?

With Moammar Gadhafi and his regime driven from their strongholds in Tripoli, the most pressing question now is whether the rebels will be able to set up a government and establish order in the capital and the rest of Libya. In their battle so far, the rebels have been boosted by NATO air power. Western [...]

Cheney: I Urged Bush To Bomb Syria

“Former Vice President Dick Cheney says in a new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007,” The New York Times reports this morning. But Bush didn’t follow the vice president’s advice — and none of the president’s other top advisers thought bombing Syria [...]

‘Train Dreams’ Evokes Frontier Life, Fate And Death

Think of the spare straight lines of a Grant Wood engraving. Denis Johnson’s striking new short novel about life, fate and death in the early 20th-century American mountain West, leaves that impression — plain yet stark in its depiction of an ordinary man’s life both particular and universal. And think of the compactness and pacing [...]

Steve Jobs And The Cultural Apple

When Steve Jobs stepped down from his position as CEO of Apple yesterday, he handed the reins immediately to chief operating officer Tim Cook, who has had such a significant hand in day-to-day operations that many expect that Apple won’t immediately suffer much in the way of effects on either its ability to turn out [...]