They don't "always assume" that, because modern Christianity, especially Protestants, generally do their best to forget Jesus' rather chilly attitude towards sex and marriage in the gospels. Remember that you're talking about the guy who extolled becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven. It's not clear what Jesus…

Good article, but I'm going to quibble about this: "fluid gender roles, like the male officers wearing skirts." That's fluidity only if they can freely wear pants when they feel like it. What you seem to be describing here is role-reversal, where men do what women are expected by the audience to do, and women do what…

Hills of Home is on DVD, in a TCM 2-disc set.

If we arm them right, they won't *need* armor — they'll kill all the Hajjis without getting a scratch themselves.

Yeah, I was wondering myself. Why was this guy hanging around an elementary school in this outfit in the first place? It would be one thing if he'd been passing by on his way to a nerdboy convention or something. Or if he was there to delight his own child. Otherwise, why around an elementary school? Why not in…

And I'd add "Till You Come Back to Me (That's All I'm Gonna Do" — written by Stevie Wonder, but one of my favorites as she sang it.

Oh, cool! What a great idea! Get the Hunger Games team to make a three-part (or maybe four-part, with the last seven-hour segment divided in two for artistic reasons) film adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses, aimed at the YA market.

Just more evidence of the failure of our once-proud public schools. How are we going to compete with Japan if our kids don't know the classics of the 90s?

Nope. That's exactly the kind of stuff that makes me agree with The Space Pope. I started noticing C&H relatively late, after everyone else did, and while I liked it I never quite fell in love with it. More recently I went through the first volume of the doorstop, erm, I mean the giant boxed set, and I keep meaning…

But do they even have Thanksgiving in Africa?

Well, I don't know about that. Here's what MLK said about LBJ and some other guy:

Maybe that's true in the movies, but not in … I dunno, real life? The way history is taught in school, for example, fits your description of what people supposedly want, but students and just about everybody else finds it boring. Teach them the real history, in all its messiness and ambiguity, and they get…

No, and they weren't surprising in South Korea either, under the dictatorship that the US imposed and then propped up until they fell, deposed by their own people, in the late 1980s. South Korea's human rights abuses were also quite shocking in that period.

Um, South Korea was not one of North Korea's "neighbors." They were one country, divided into two by US fiat. And most Koreans, north or south, still think of them as one country. You have a rather blinkered notion of Korean history, it seems.

"Those that have the power to hurt, but will do none … " — Bill Somebody

"Those that have the power to hurt, but will do none … " — Bill Somebody

This is a really weird comment. I'm tempted to quote the bit about thanking Gabby Johnson from Blazing Saddles, but I think I'll just leave it there.

He used to be better. He did some important work to make Black American history more accessible, and he framed it aggressively — anyone else old enough to remember "Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed"? That sort of approach didn't endear him to many whites. Dyson quotes some things he said in that period that…

Well, this is highly subjective but I don't think Cosby can fairly be called "not an attractive man"; certainly not in his younger days. That's one thing that makes this business (or alleged business, to be scrupulous) even more disturbing. I can't believe he really needed to drug women to get them into bed (though…

Sonny, I'm from the era in which it was first published, and I had no trouble with it. I also read a collection of critical articles about it, from the mid-70s I think, and the main complaint I remember is that Heller's prose was too simple and dumbed down. One could make a case for that, I guess, but I disagree; in…