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Philip MartinArkansas Online |
I have decided to fix a few things.
James Crawford’s “The Vanishing Earth” contends that extraction has become more than an economic activity—it has become the defining habit of...
In Arkansas, when national rankings arrive, we traditionally console ourselves by saying, "Thank God for Mississippi." It isn't...
Like Gustave Flaubert, I believe there are no true synonyms. Every word occupies its own territory of meaning. Lonesome and lonely are not...
Launched as a 24-hour music video experiment, MTV became the loudest voice of a generation — and quietly reshaped fashion, fame and the way we...
In Arkansas, when national rankings arrive, we traditionally console ourselves by saying, "Thank God for Mississippi." It isn't generous, but neither...
Sports shows and movies are often bad because sports already possess most of the machinery movies labor to manufacture: clear goals, escalating...
I would not have shot that dog.
Nathan Van McKinney II’s rough-edged Arkansas yarn draws the reader close, while Valeria Luiselli’s artful new novel inspires admiration at a...
There is a temptation to herd writers into literary ghettos: southern, western, nature, historical, regional. These labels are meant to be...
Most baseball books begin with an opinion. Gordon Shepherd's begins with a question: Is there a more systematic way to think about greatness?
A team of scholars led by sociologist R. Gordon Shepherd ranks the game’s legends within their own eras, offering a historically grounded...
I am no Rex Nelson, but I do a fair amount of public speaking. I do not find audiences especially daunting. The part that bothers me is everything...
Some paintings attract attention because of who painted them. Others because of what they depict. Little Rock’s Suzanne Mosley’s portrait of a...
This is not the polished beauty we expect from movies about the ancient world.
The most unsettling aspect about our politics isn't that politicians lie. It's that we expect them to.
Unlike most books I've read and movies I've seen, "Lonesome Dove" stays with me. I haven't opened it since shortly after it was published in 1985, but...
BOSSIER CITY -- The Horseshoe Casino has become part of an annual ritual. For about a month each summer, my mother trades the humidity and heat of...
Bacardi Black Rum does what an entry-level spirit is supposed to do. It’s trying to become the dependable house bottle that earns its place on the...
Sixty years after ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ Bob Dylan’s masterpiece is harder to recognize as revolutionary precisely because it changed the language...
Hearing is not the same as listening.
Argument is part of the pleasure of baseball. No game has ever been more thoroughly measured. We know launch angles, spin rates, exit velocities,...
A few recent baseball books arriving this month approach the game from entirely different directions, yet they seem animated by the same conviction...
We were walking home west along the River Trail in North Little Rock after Lucinda Williams closed out the Arkansas Folklife Festival a couple of...
Netflix’s documentary on Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert reveals a complicated story that isn’t really about tennis.
For years critics treated self-published books as easy rejects. Lately, a handful of independent authors have reminded me that the best reason to...
A funny weird thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago.
This week's releases range from Margo Price's politically charged folk-country and Kacey Musgraves' introspective songwriting to Keith Urban's...
Today’s best television keeps returning to film noir — not for its shadows and cigarette smoke, but because those old stories still understand the...
When the 33rd Iowa Infantry reached Helena in January 1863, Andrew F. Sperry recalled that "some of the boys profanely denominated it...
Back in the days when people sent letters, I kept a correspondence file.
BENTONVILLE -- Every city is a palimpsest.
AMC’s ‘Dark Winds’ borrows the visual language of the classic Western while replacing myth with community and spectacle with lived experience.
The hardest stories are so ordinary that no one thinks to notice them.
Democrat-Gazette online
The point isn’t to identify one movie that towers above all the others. We no longer inhabit a movie culture dominated by a handful of obvious...
For more than 30 years I've carried business cards that read: "Philip Martin, hack writer & plagiarist."
Two new histories revisit moments when Americans thought they could see what came next — a mercury boom in southwest Arkansas and a nation’s grand...
If you watch a lot of British crime dramas, you eventually begin to suspect that the United Kingdom is covered by an enormous security camera system.
James McMurtry calls himself a working musician, a beer salesman. His songs suggest something stranger: a writer who hears people so completely that...
Democrat-Gazette online
May 26 marked the centennial of Miles Davis' birth, an anniversary he almost certainly would have hated.
While critics and editors debate lists and categories and her proper placement in the American canon, she will spend an evening standing on a stage in...
I ran into a musician friend I hadn't seen in a while the other evening; we were walking out of a library event as he was walking in. He looked...
Thomas W. Laqueur’s new book “The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History” argues that those apparently incidental animals are doing far more work than...
Father's Day always falls on a Sunday, which means I could recycle an old column and take the day off. Change a date, smooth out a paragraph, fix an...
I knew my cards were worth something when I gave them away.
Like an artist sketching what surrounds an object, Zinzi Clemmons reveals freedom by tracing its absence, while Isaiah Berlin explains why its...
Democrat-Gazette online
A Wednesday night at White Water Tavern, two Arkansas songwriters and an unexpected reminder that ordinary lives, ordinary disappointments and...
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