The public intellectual face of Modern Orthodoxy comes to look too much like the Haredi world, with whom we disagree profoundly on issues of gender and women’s place. More importantly, it widens the every growing[…]
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Author: Drew Kaplan
“Modern fantasy began with the release of George Lucas’s ‘Star Wars’, in 1977, which paid homage to the ‘Flash Gordon’ and ‘Buck Rogers’ serials of the thirties”
Modern fantasy began with the release of George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” in 1977, which paid homage to the “Flash Gordon” and “Buck Rogers” serials of the thirties. The project drew Wagner comparisons almost from the[…]
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“It is probably no coincidence that the superhero emerged in the nineteen-thirties, at a time when totalitarian regimes were overrunning Europe and Russia”
Wagner’s master array of borrowed, modified, and reinvented archetypes—the wanderer on a ghost ship, the savior with no name, the cursed ring, the sword in the tree, the sword reforged, the novice with unsuspected powers—lurks[…]
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“It is an astonishing cultural transformation: the “Ride” remade into an anthem of American supremacy. This displacement is of a piece with other troubling historical continuities of the postwar era: Nazi scientists migrating to America, Gestapo-style torture techniques resurfacing in Iraq, the cult of the sculpted body perpetuating Riefenstahl’s Aryan ideal”
It is an astonishing cultural transformation: the “Ride” remade into an anthem of American supremacy. This displacement is of a piece with other troubling historical continuities of the postwar era: Nazi scientists migrating to America,[…]
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“‘Apocalypse’ soon became a military fetish object, its Wagner scene influencing real-life behavior”
The entrance of the main Valkyrie motif coincides with a wide shot of fourteen helicopters in flight. The soldiers ready their guns; Kilgore nods to the music. Another wide shot coincides with a gleaming B-major[…]
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“The ‘Ride’ seems a foreordained choice for the helicopter operation in ‘Apocalypse Now'”
For decades before Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” aerial warfare had been stirring thoughts of the Valkyries and their “air-horses,” as Wagner called them. In Proust’s “Time Regained,” the Germanophile dandy Robert de Saint-Loup watches a zeppelin[…]
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“The tradition of blessing a person to live to 120 years, as a way of wishing someone long life, only began in the last few hundred years”
The tradition of blessing a person to live to 120 years, as a way of wishing someone long life, only began in the last few hundred years. The term ad me’ah ve’esrim appears in responsa[…]
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“Had observers better grasped white anxieties unleashed by the growth of America’s nonwhite population and the two-term Presidency of Barack Obama, Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 would have come as no surprise”
Twenty years after Myrdal published his report, and five years after King travelled to India, the dream of seeing aggressive anti-discrimination legislation in America was realized: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.[…]
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“The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development”
The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and[…]
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“Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress”
Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more[…]
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