If your politics lean left and you dread the dinner table conversation with your conservative relatives at the next holiday get-together, here’s what you do. Recommend they see Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron in the wish-fulfillment romantic comedy Long Shot and tell them they’ll love it. They may never talk to you again. The Democrat […]

In author Jennie Rooney’s fictional novel Red Joan, an eighty-seven-year-old English widow named Joan Stanley reads the obituary of someone she used to know. A man called Sir William Mitchell has passed away. The book gives voice to Joan’s thoughts as she reads the cause of death, a cause that comes as no surprise to […]

Stockholm Syndrome is a term coined by newspapers reporting on the conclusions made by a Swedish criminologist and psychiatrist on an event that occurred in the early seventies. The name given to the peculiar condition was Norrmalmstorgssyndromet, something that would clearly prove unpronounceable to the majority of English speaking readers. To make things easier, a […]

As New York City workers, tourists, and commuters go about their daily life, heading for the subway, gathering on an already crowded platform and eventually boarding their train, you can hear the sound of the orchestra warming up, readying for performance. “In the city’s underground,” sings Lloyd, the homeless guy (Giancarlo Esposito), “There’s a symphony […]

On August 16, 1819, at a public square in Manchester, England known as St. Peter’s Field, upon the order of the local magistrates, with sabres drawn, a determined cavalry charged into a peaceful crowd of working-class protesters. It was a massacre. Numbers differ from report to report, but there were thought to be approximately 70,000 […]