rakemag Tell me again Dr. Frist what you’ll do for me The outcry is mounting against the new bankruptcy bill making its way through Congress. In case you haven’t been paying attention, the credit card companies, in particular, are behind the move to deny bankruptcy protection to the victims of what amounts to organized crime. Molly … Read more
One of the continuing mysteries in my life is how anyone can take Ann Coulter seriously. She’s the living example of how so called authors can take a smidgen of material and turn it into the most bald-faced lies…and get away with it. Thank God for Al Franken, who knows a lie when he sees … Read more
At the risk of getting too self referential here, I’m going to recommend Brad Zellar’s blog entry from yesterday. It’s about why his blog is the antithesis of this one. The editor and I are often fairly earnest here…in a Buck Turgidson sort of way. Brad, though, has defined his take perfectly. He’s disgusted, or … Read more
Please can I have some health insurance? Representative Jim Ramstad gave us a good chuckle this morning in his Strib op-ed piece, “Too much at stake for continued partisan warfare.” He rattles off a litany of the nation’s problems: social security, hungry children, crisis in public schools, out of control health care costs, national security, … Read more
Dear Reader, in an effort to clear our accounts and our desks each March, we lay before you our laurels and our brickbats. (We noticed from the account books that we have gone through quite a few brickbats, without really knowing what a brickbat is, or where one might be obtained at a reasonable cost.) … Read more
We saw Adrian Brody coming from a long way away, ever since King of the Hill. It’s not just his charm (his ads for Ermenegildo Zegna make us weak in the knees); his talent leads him to play characters who are subject to a heartbreaking array of misfortunes, humiliations, and trials. Here he plays Jack … Read more
Every Ramones fan knows the band was made up of weirdos. That’s a big part of why we loved them. Joey was a beanpole geek, Johnny a mop-topped grump, Dee Dee a streetwise cartoon boyÑthey were a lot like the screwed-up teenagers that we were. Of course, they also blew away the reigning “classic rock” … Read more
For those of us who think Tom Stoppard is the greatest English playwright since Shakespeare, the DVD release of the movie of his first play has been eagerly anticipated since that date about six years ago when we put it on our Amazon wish list. The 1967 play introduced Stoppard’s conceit of a play within … Read more
For Chang, hip-hop isn’t just a reigning musical genre; it’s a rising force getting ready to reshape the nation. As a co-founder of the influential hip-hop label Solesides and producer of groups like the Ghetto Prophets, the man knows firsthand the power of the beat to change culture, politics, and society. One of the nation’s … Read more
When U.S. publishers give teenagers book deals, there’s usually some hard partying in the pages. Snow White follows that rule–to the consternation of book-loving Poland, which reluctantly nominated the then-nineteen-year-old Maslowska for the Nike Prize, its highest literary honor. Maslowska’s tale of addiction and self-destruction is so brutal it has been compared to Irvine Welsh’s … Read more