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So the Academy Awards have asked Jon Stewart back to host, despite the fact that his last outing, in 2006, drew fewer viewers than Chris Rock before him and Ellen DeGeneres after. Naturally, people are starting to ask why, including LA Weekly’s Nikki Finke. (To be specific, she asks: “Has the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences …
Tumbling Woman, Fischl, 2002 — Photo: AP
Over the past couple of days, Blogger Tyler Green has had a series of posts about art produced after 9/11 that tried to come to grips with the event. Interesting idea. Let me throw in one candidate not mentioned by him so far, especially because it’s very effectiveness caused it so many …
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From the washingtonpost.com chat with Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush:
Baltimore: Does president bush ever comment on people like Keith Olbermann or other liberals who really hate him?
Robert Draper: Never! He is not one to pay attention of any kind to his critics. And for that matter, Bush told
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My long commentary yesterday on the state of reconstruction at the World Trade Center site brought in a number of passionate replies from readers. One of the most typical? That the powers that be should simply have re-built the towers as they were. (Or as one reader proposed “but taller, much taller!”) Even now, when it’s plainly not …
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No sooner did time.com post my All-TIME 100 TV Shows than a package showed up at my office with a brand-new book: I Heart TV: Your Ultimate Companion to 100 Essential Shows, from the editors of TV Guide. Spooky! Well, not so much, since the book was messengered over by TV Guide’s publicist, but still, what are the odds?
So how do our …
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Your computer continues to eat your TV. Online gossip guru Perez Hilton–who did a bit this summer on Victoria Beckham’s NBC reality special–premieres What Perez Sez About tonight on VH1. (Or is it just called What Perez Sez? There seems to be some disagreement.) Out of sheer curiosity I (which, as always, means, “at least my TiVo”) …
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It didn’t take long after that cloudless Tuesday on the Eastern seaboard for the Sept. 11 attacks to become video wallpaper–the crashes, the fireballs, the towers collapsing, over and over and over. Six years later, plenty of people are still bothered by how often and how casually TV news replays what are, after all, the images of …
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Bernard Shaw and Peter Arnett from Baghdad in 1991.
When I finished the All-TIME 100 TV Shows list, I had so much leftover list-making energy that I came up with a sidebar list of 10 influential TV news events. The editors of time.com decided that was one more bell and/or whistle than the package needed. But waste not, want not: I give …
So here it is, the sixth anniversary of that morning. Last night I was walking down the Hudson River boardwalk near my apartment in Jersey City, N. J., which is directly across the water from where the World Trade Center used to be. Every year, there’s a memorial at this time produced by scores of floodlights positioned some blocks …
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In today’s installment of That Darn List!, the problem of good shows that turn bad. One problem I dealt with over and over when deciding whether to put long-running series on my top-100 list was what to do with shows that started great and ended embarrassing. Do the sanctimonious years of M*A*S*H outweigh the hilarious years? Could The …
And the winners, if that’s the word for it, of this controversial commission are Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Tod and Billie, a husband and wife team, are two of the most gifted and thoughtful architects I know. Their American Folk Art Museum in New York is on my short list of the great jewel box interiors anywhere in the U.S. It …
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Topic of the morning: Britney Spears’ performance at the VMAs–cringingly unwatchable trainwreck, or brilliant work of meta commentary?
Think about it. The Britney we saw on stage was a listless, lifeless, gone-to-seed shell of the dynamic teen sexpot we remembered from stage just a few years ago. She was inert, unenthusiastic and a …
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…courtesy of his mouthpieces at Best Week Ever. Now if I can only get Seven of Nine pissed off at me, I can die happy.
