The Latest(ish)
It was amiable chitchat, a piece of fluff for last Sunday’s New York Times. Just how do you get hold of tickets for The Producers, Broadway’s hottest show, a musical about a musical devoted to Hitler? The newspaper ran through the alternatives: sleazy scalpers, cunning concierges, even a crafty charitable contribution or two, and then fell back on that most effective of Manhattan ruses, “It’s whom you get to know.” For, as the Times explained, every night the “house” hangs on to tickets for distribution to a favored few. Readers were told that Rocco Landesman, the show’s lead producer, has [...]
Springtime for Castro
May 30, 2001
You don’t need to have seen Scream to know that horror movies have conventions that must be followed. For example, from almost the first few minutes it is generally possible to guess who will survive, and who is going to die. Typically, a nice, likable character will be one of the first to perish. Such a death sets a suitably downbeat tone, and previews the implacability of the torment to come. So it was on last night’s season finale of West Wing. It was a weirdly lurid episode, which made little or no sense until one understood it for what [...]
The Horror, The Horror
May 17, 2001
The West Wing; published originally in National Review Online
Imagine, if you can, Berlin in November 1938, the grim capital of a savage ideology heading deeper into horror and cruelty. The New York Times correspondent has just emerged from an interview with the Fuhrer. It is an exclusive. His editor will be pleased. On the way home the Times man passes a looted synagogue, and the broken bodies of those who were worshiping there. Elsewhere, homes and businesses are being ransacked, and their occupants are under attack. Other victims are rounded up and dragged to the concentration camps from which far too few will ever emerge. Filing a report [...]
The Paper of Record
May 15, 2001
TO Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, it is the moment of crisis, the turning point when it all starts to go wrong; “You see this picture of a little boy with a stuffed bunny in one hand and a Lego gun in the other.” Society, she argues, will push the tot to drop the rabbit, and this, she believes, is a tragedy, a brutal suppression of the sensitive man-child within. It is for insights such as these that Jane Fonda has just awarded Harvard $12.5 million, endowing a chair in Gilligan’s name. That’s very fortunate for Gilligan, because my nephew, Oliver, [...]
(War) Toy Story: Where have you gone, G.I.Joe?
May 14, 2001
There is always something of the theatre about the announcement of a British election: the trip to Buckingham Palace to secure the Queen’s approval to dissolve Parliament ahead of the vote (her Majesty was “graciously pleased to signify that she [would] comply with the request”); the press corps outside Downing Street; the over-excited intrigues in Westminster. Tuesday’s decision by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to call an election for June 7th was no exception, but the leaders of the U.K.’s two principal parties both managed to add their own personal touch. The Conservatives’ William Hague, a self-styled outsider, leapt on [...]
Hopeless in the U.K.
May 10, 2001
I suppose that we should not be surprised. NASA is, after all, a federal bureaucracy, little more, really than the postal service in a space suit. Nevertheless, the surly and self-important way in which the agency has handled Dennis Tito, Earth’s first extra-planetary tourist, would have embarrassed even the IRS. Unless you have been living in Mars (and, perhaps, even then) you will know that Mr. Tito is an American aerospace engineer turned financial tycoon who paid a reported $20 million for a round-rip ticket to the Russian space station, Mir. Sadly, gravity, high-maintenance bills, and aging technology conspired to [...]
Cosmic Capitalist
May 1, 2001