Tuned InUncategorized
There are many different roles chess has played in popular culture: source of excitement, metaphor for conflict, cause of (or at least form of expression for) madness (e.g., Nabokov’s The Defense). Last night’s HBO documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World, involved all of those, and was both an empathetic biography and fascinating …
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When he was making the rounds for his World War II documentary in 2007, Ken Burns told me (and other reporters) that he had finally decided to make a film about Vietnam too. Here’s what he said at the time:
Not today, but–there was a point where, with the same vehemence of conviction that I said it after The Civil War, I’d said that
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Ken Burns’ The National Parks: America’s Best Idea begins its nightly run (twelve hours, in six parts) on PBS Sunday night. Last week, I wrote a column about how its premise—that Big Government saved wilderness and national treasures that private enterprise would have destroyed—is a lot more politically pointed (in the year of the …
Tuned In
Yesterday I used the Bobby-Jindal-is-Kenneth-the-page meme to go on a tangent about actors playing outside their ethnicity, in particular on shows like Saturday Night Live. “It’s not generally white European Americans who get substituted for,” I wrote, “though there had to have been good black George W. Bushes out there.”
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