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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 [...]

‘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 [...]

On Location: ‘Fort Apache,’ A War Zone In The Bronx

When the film Fort Apache, The Bronx, starring Paul Newman as a conflicted cop patrolling a neighborhood ravaged by poverty and drugs, came out in 1981, it was a controversial hit. Local community leaders fought with the film’s producers and threatened to sue because of the way the film depicted blacks and Puerto Ricans. Fort [...]

Sell Your Hoard: The Canny Cocktail Of Fox’s ‘Buried Treasure’

There are two kinds of household-junk reality shows at the moment. One is valuable-stuff shows, where people’s stuff turns out to be worth a lot of money. Whether it’s Pawn Stars or the more upscale Antiques Roadshow, the hook is the promise that whatever is lying around the house might be secretly valuable. The other [...]

New In Paperback: August 22-28

If You Wish ‘Top Chef’ Were More High-Strung, Welcome Back ‘Just Desserts’

Some spin-offs are pointless; watered-down versions of their original selves, without purpose or energy. But some are like Top Chef: Just Desserts, which returns for its second season on Bravo tonight. TC: JD is really quite different from regular Top Chef and has its own distinct reason to exist. In short, based on the first [...]

‘Color Line’ Still A Potent Force In The U.S.

While many hoped Barack Obama’s presidency would usher in a post-racial period in America, law professor Randall Kennedy says the reality never lived up to that expectation. In The Persistence of the Color Line, Kennedy explores the racial issues still at play in Obama’s presidency and throughout the country. “I think that something big and [...]

‘Endless’ Amour: A Steamy Story Of Teenage Passion

Upon reading the deeply serious opening of Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, you will very likely laugh out loud. The tone is something like what you might find in a teenager’s diary: verbose, feverish, furiously self-important. This is a book, you know by the bottom of page one, beneath which the burners are always set on [...]

‘Iron Crows’: Surviving In A Toxic Shipyard

“Well, it beats working in the salt mines.” Homespun expressions like these help people shrug off a tough day at the office. Because no matter how much they resent the grinding drudgery of filing paperwork or sitting through meetings or seeing the new Conan the Barbarian movie in 3-D, at least they’re not doing the [...]