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Philip MartinArkansas Online |
Paul Greenberg, this newspaper's late legendary editorial page editor and columnist, understood an Arkansas summer is less a season than a...
Bryan Burrough strips the mythology from the men who made the West wild, while Donald ‘Skip’ Hays turns contemporary Arkansas politics into a...
The old cultural signals of aging are disappearing. Maybe the trick isn’t staying young but staying curious.
I'm far from a Luddite. I like having the accumulated knowledge of civilization in my pocket, even if it's mostly used to check the weather, being...
Four decades after ‘Less Than Zero,’ Bret Easton Ellis returns to the beautiful, numb Los Angeles teenagers who made his reputation. Ryan Murphy...
Recordings preserve musicians at a particular moment while allowing listeners to arrive whenever they please. John Coltrane’s first album as a...
Dave Marsh, who died Friday at 76, belonged to a generation of rock critics who believed records mattered enough to fight over with the moral...
Richard Russo’s “Under the Falls” turns his familiar territory of wounded men and declining towns into a brisk, dark literary thriller.
Until recently, Jason Arday was a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge University, where he was celebrated as its youngest Black...
Hollywood used to give us ballplayers, golfers, boxers and hockey goons. Since it won’t make those movies anymore, here are the sequels it owes us.
Jason A. Ney’s “Richard Fleischer: Journeyman” makes the case for a versatile director who spent his career in the shadow of his brilliant...
Anyone can accuse anyone of anything. We ought to admit that before the terrible details begin working on us and we find ourselves certain of things...
“Furious” is loosely based on Bob Rafelson’s entertaining 1987 thriller “Black Widow,” in which Debra Winger plays a federal investigator...
Last Wednesday morning my inbox looked like a graduate seminar in political prediction.
Ashley Kahn’s exhaustive new history revisits Paul Simon’s masterpiece, the South African musicians who made it possible and the controversy that...
We live near railroad tracks, not far from the Baring Cross Bridge over the Arkansas River. The first bridge at that location opened in 1873,...
In ‘The Amateur,’ Chris Bohjalian revisits ‘Lolita,’ the postwar American novel and the uneasy border between literary and popular fiction.
Matthew McConaughey will appear at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in a 3:30 p.m. conversation Aug. 14 with filmmaker Jeff Nichols before receiving...
Last week the Los Angeles Dodgers, having found the experience of winning back-to-back World Series insufficiently reassuring, acquired Tarik Skubal...
Apple Music, Netflix and Spotify have become astonishingly good at predicting what we’ll enjoy next. But recommendation isn’t the same thing as...
The question running through all three is not whether the music is "authentic" -- a word that usually conceals more than it reveals -- but whether the...
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...