Media
Dry Land
At my local CVS Pharmacy in Virginia, I can buy dental floss, nail polish, aspirin, and mailing envelopes. I can also purchase booze: Yellow Tail Merlot, an orange-...
Breaking News
If you took the DNA of the movies Broadcast News and The Thirty-Nine Steps, added a pinch of Mad Men mystique, and mixed it all together in an art deco cocktail...
Beyond Black & White
Here are some things you might expect to find on HBO: Prohibition-era gangsters. Post-Katrina New Orleans jazzmen. Vampires. Bill Maher. Here’s something you might...
Praying for a Living
A tattoo of a cross shimmers on an African Methodist Episcopal minister’s calf, a few inches above her red stiletto sandals. A chubby-cheeked young rabbi and his...
‘The Game’s On’
In an age of Google Earth and Twitter, when Facebook knows more about you than your mother does, and advertisers track your every move online, would anyone have...
The New Jerusalem
Who knew that seventeenth-century Puritan John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, allowed a reality-TV crew to follow him around? A hand-held camera has captured...
Sympathy for the Devil
Dante’s Inferno stands on its head in the mildly amusing, candy-colored series Neighbors from Hell, the first original primetime animated entertainment from the...
Urban Studies
Because it’s co-created by David Simon, the genius behind the justly extolled crime saga The Wire, the new HBO drama Treme faces a critical test. No, not ratings: I...
Feeding the Multitudes
Your eyes and ears tell you that Scenes from a Parish is a documentary. So does a source that might be more reliable: PBS. Had it not been so, you might swear that...
Nature's Cathedrals
By now, you might think, celebrated filmmaker Ken Burns should be able to concoct historical documentaries in his sleep. With acclaimed series like The Civil War,...
Scriptural Soap
It’s extreme-makeover time for a portion of the Old Testament—and the results are pretty swanky. Kings, a recently launched NBC drama, sets the story of David and...
Temple or Memorial?
These days the news business appears to be teetering precariously between extinction and a banal ubiquity. On the one hand, each day seems to usher in more crises...
