My little brother says there were a couple things about the Sopranos finale that lifted it into greatness. 1, The characterization of Tony’s power. Tony could on the one hand manipulate his men into thinking that he wanted rival boss…
One of the great things about blogging is that all the stuff I fulminated about in private over the last few years (not getting assigned to write about it for Mainstream magazines) I now have to put down in cyberspace,…
Everyone is now so intoxicated with The Sopranos (including me) that the producers think they can do anything they want with us. It’s not a good spot, for us or them. Last night’s season finale (which precedes a final season)…
There was a year or two that I wanted one, and didn’t spring for it, and a good thing too. Now they’re everywhere. This one stared me down in my room at the Wyndham Hotel chain this weekend. Didn’t buy…
The reason I was at the Wyndham, I was attending the Andover commencement (my wife’s niece). There was something thrilling about it, something else crushing. The thrilling thing is that diversity is today a bold insurmountable fact of elite culture….
Former CIA analyst Robert Baer (author of a new novel, and of See No Evil, which became the film Syriana) said on the Charlie Rose show the other night what so many of us believe: Iraq is a total failure,…
Finally someone has done the article I wanted to read long ago: What is Harvard’s reaction to the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on the Israel lobby (which was half-produced on the shores of the Charles, where co-author Walt was a dean). The…
John Podhoretz has now sent me a note to explain his first email to me: Good Lord, Weiss, I was making fun of your preposterous and hysterical neocon baiting. I presumed you would see my name at the top of…
A couple days ago I did my most successful item, counting by serious comments: about the vanishing progressive Jewish presence in public life, from my viewpoint as an assimilating Jew. Later that day I opened my email to discover a…