|
![]() |
![]() Philip MartinArkansas Online |
I recently lost 131,000 emails. They vanished during an operating system upgrade--Mac OS Tahoe 26.0,
Stand-up comedy, at its most potent, works like Samizdat, the underground literature passed hand to hand in the Soviet years, typed and retyped on...
We like to tell ourselves that bullies don't win. We say "hurt people hurt people," as if cruelty is necessarily the product of insecurity or misery....
Fall is the grown-up season at the movies — or at least it pretends to be.
Democrat-Gazette online"Nice guys finish last." We've heard the line 1,000 times, sanded down into a proverb that sounds as old as competition itself.
Jason Morphew is not exactly a household name in his home state, though he probably ought to be.
D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary “Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back” doesn’t explain Bob Dylan so much as trap him in a frame, turning the...
Czeslaw Milosz defected from communist Poland in 1951, carrying not just the memory of a ruined country but a diagnosis of how authoritarianism seeps...
Michael Phillips is leaving the Chicago Tribune.
Tom Epperson has always been a writer of contradictions and of conscience.
Elaine de Kooning’s “Standing Bull” (1958) is a work of art that charges at you — soaked in light, saturated with muscular energy and visibly...
Democrat-Gazette onlineYou can go to baseball games for more than 60 years and, on any given day, still be surprised.
Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” doesn’t so much begin as stumble awake, like you’ve walked in on someone else’s nightmare at the exact moment it...
In Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) shuffles through her crumbling mansion like a ghost who refuses to...
Jay Duplass came to Arkansas to give a talk he called “How to Make Movies in the Apocalypse.” That sounds scary, but maybe that’s where we are....
"I will work harder."The line belongs to Boxer, the loyal horse in George Orwell's "Animal Farm."
Journalism, often called the "Fourth Branch" of government, carries a sacred responsibility to truth, accuracy, and objectivity.
If you want to take the temperature of a culture, don't look at its laws or its literature.
Democrat-Gazette online"Work's my middle name."--Guy Clark, "Dublin Blues"My editor won't like this one.Whether
Driving through the back roads of Northwest Arkansas at night, you’re bound to see them: long, low structures with light bleeding out of their...
It’s possible that “Southern cinema” is a contradiction in terms.
August always feels like a transitional month for music.
Today is World Photography Day. That's my news hook, the artificial peg on which I'm hanging this column.
I should say up front that I'm a little biased.Back
One afternoon in the early ’60s, a boy with a saxophone knocked on the door of a Hot Springs parsonage and asked if the girl who lived there might...
You don't have to know Carolyn Yeldell Staley to feel like you're in her company when you read "The Boy Next Door: My Sixty-Year Friendship with Bill...
Democrat-Gazette onlineThere's a growing tendency, even among the commentariat, to characterize the MAGA movement as a more aggressive form of...
After a 15-year absence, “King of the Hill” is returning to television. It’s a quiet resurrection, without much fanfare or frenzy — fitting...
There is an understated scene early in William Wyler’s “The Best Years of Our Lives” that nevertheless carries the weight of 1,000...
They knew 'em all from Boston to Dubuque/Especially Willie, Mickey, and the Duke ...--Terry
I was 14 the first time I heard "Captain Jack."
Murder used to be my beat.
If you spend appreciable time in Arkansas, you might come to know the sound of a wood duck cutting across flooded timber, the hush of pine needles...
Let’s say you wanted to run a criminal enterprise — not in theory, but in practice.
There’s something nearly impossible to explain to people who weren’t there, or weren’t there in that way: what it meant to walk into a mall...
A couple of weeks ago I opened an email from an address I didn't recognize.The
They say family shapes us, confines us, molds us in ways we only recognize when something breaks.
It’s not easy to talk about Taylor Swift to people who grew up with Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Bruce...
In a summer full of reissues and reinventions, three very different albums remind us how time changes not just the music, but the ears we bring to it.
“Taxi Driver” doesn’t unspool like a traditional narrative — it unfolds like a fever dream.
There are movie stars, then there are monuments.
A few months back, a box showed up on my porch from Simon & Schuster--plain cardboard, discreetly stamped "Children's & Young Adult."
"Even Donald Trump has got soul."I
In the summer of 1986, New Orleans felt thick.
Netflix’s “Quarterback” returns for its second season with three familiar faces — one more familiar than the others. Jared Goff, Joe Burrow...
In the long dream of American cinema, Hal Ashby occupies a strange and haunted room — off the hallway of the greats, cluttered with forgotten...
On a hot July afternoon at Alberta Springs Golf Resort, a former NHL enforcer reminded everyone who he used to be.
Nobody ever told us morality would--or should--be easy.
Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes … ■ ■ ■ John Fogerty didn’t. What he inherited was older and stranger. A voice made from gravel...
Some records show up like postcards from someplace you used to live, signed by someone you still love.