Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies is not entertainment in the popular sense of the word. It places high demands on the viewer. Think of it as going to a museum whose paintings are challenging for the senses;  or going to the theater to see a modern piece like Waiting for Godod.  A group of British children image [Read More]

The King’s Speech

Think back to the terrifying moment when you gave your first public speech. You may be a great storyteller when surrounded but friends and family. But now you step onto the podium looking out to an audience of strangers who are all focused on you starting your speech. Your mouth is getting dry, your tongue image [Read More]

Peggy Noonan executes Don Rumsfeld

I was impressed with Peggy Noonan when she—although a Republican partisan—called Sarah Palin’s nomination ridiculous. Her commitment to truth and integrity made her write this scathing review of Donald Rumsfeld memoirs in the WSJ. The One That Got Away Memoirist Rumsfeld seems to forget why we went to Afghanistan. I like Donald Rumsfeld. I’ve always thought he image [Read More]

The New Humanism

David Brooks continues to lay out in the NY Times his argument for a new humanism that tries to understand how human beings flourish collectively. Over the course of my career, I’ve covered a number of policy failures. When the Soviet Union fell, we sent in teams of economists, oblivious to the lack of social trust image [Read More]

A Passage to India

Do novelists and poets change the world or do simply please and entertain us? I suspect that the best novelists sense the early signs of a new mood and outlook. If truly gifted, they are able to put in words and stories such a new outlook, infect the rest of us with it, and thereby image [Read More]

My Fair Lady

George Cukor, the director of this extraordinarily fun film, admitted:  Give me a good script, and I’ll be a hundred times better as a director. My Fair Lady is based on the play Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts by the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw.  The writer won the Nobel Prize in literature (1925) image [Read More]