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![]() Philip MartinArkansas Online |
Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” (1975) is a meditation — an elegy told in slow, flickering motion, drifting across the screen like smoke from...
Bruce Springsteen has always been a haunted man. Haunted by his father’s silence and the black dog of depression. Haunted by his country’s sins...
We're told, from the first day we stand shoulder to shoulder with fidgety classmates, one hand mashed over our hearts, we're supposed to love America.
"The machine itself makes no demands: it is the people who create it, and use it, that demand the sacrifices ..."--
Some novels want to dazzle you with fireworks; Lee Cole's "Fulfillment" does something trickier.
Over the past week, I've soaked in James McMurtry's new album, "The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy" (2025), the way I once soaked in a new Jackson...
South of Houma, La., where the land forgets to be land and instead gives up, blade by blade, to the Gulf, my mother waits.
On June 22, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Act to Establish the Department of Justice into law. On its face, it was a bureaucratic...
It started with a click. I was searching for a birthday present for my mother — born in 1937, raised on a tobacco farm, rode a mule to school —...
In a year crowded with deluxe boxed sets and algorithm-friendly vinyl drops, a handful of records reminds us what music is for: memory, reckoning, and...
When the summer of 1975 cracked open its jaws — on June 20, to be exact — a 27-year-old Steven Spielberg gave us a perfect monster: sleek,...
There are shows that remind you how to watch television — and then there’s Peacock’s “Poker Face,” which reminds you how to look at America....
"They don't make 'em like they used to."This
June 2025 will be remembered for what it took away: two of American music's most visionary architects, Brian Wilson and Sly Stone. Wallace Stevens...
This year, Father's Day and Bloomsday arrive back-to-back: June 15 and June 16, Sunday and Monday, sentiment and myth, the Hallmark and the heretic...
Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He's weak ... He's unsure of himself ... He's a coward. Clark...
The conceit of this column is simple: I write about books I’m reading. New, old, obscure, overrated — whatever’s on the nightstand is fair game....
Thirty years ago, I turned my back on Scotch. Not out of spite. More like economic realism, a philosophical tilt toward bourbon as the people’s...
There’s a scene in “Stick,” Apple TV ’s new entry in the Feel-Good-But-Also-Broken-Dad genre, when Owen Wilson’s character — washed-up pro...
It takes wishfulness to believe a $5,000 check is in the mail because Elon Musk took a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy.
There was a time when newspapers stained your hands. The ink bled into your fingertips, rubbed into your palms; you carried it with you all day,...
The mark of a true professional is the ability to remember where you left your glove.
I don’t do many opening-day movie reviews anymore, but old habits die hard. I still keep up. I still watch. Maybe not at every Thursday-night sneak...
A quarter-century has done strange things to “Dogma,” Kevin Smith’s controversial fourth feature. What once felt like provocation now feels like...
A quiet menace lurks in Tim O'Brien's fiction, coiled within seemingly decent men.
BENTONVILLE -- About 20 years ago, not long after Alice Walton announced plans to build a world-class art museum here, we were strolling through this...
In the wake of Major League Baseball’s remarkable recent decision to lift the lifetime bans of Pete Rose and the Chicago Black Sox, we find...
I was in eighth grade when I saw “The Andromeda Strain.” It terrified me more than any horror movie ever has. I’ve seen slashers, zombies,...
We tend to believe that athletes improve over time.
Somewhere deep in the attic of the American soul, there's a dusty reel spinning. Baseball lives there. Not as a game. Not in the clinical parsing of...
Joe Strummer's guitar is for sale -- if you can afford it.
In 1960, America stood on the edge of a transformation it could not yet fully name.
There's something alchemical about a good record -- how it captures not just sound but spirit, distilling moments and memories into grooves and...
"Privilege is when you think something is not a problem because it's not a problem to you personally." -- David Gaider A quiet tension settles...
"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
The essay is an endangered form. In a hot take/"too long; didn't read" era dominated by algorithmic brevity and the ceaseless churn of instant...
In 1960, America stood on the edge of a transformation it could not yet fully name.
In the cultural landscape of midcentury America, few transformations were as subtly seismic as the slow, sometimes reluctant, elevation of country...
I am the custodian of the upstairs of our house--keeper of clutter, curator of memory.
We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together ... -- T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men" Sometimes it feels like "Tommy" never ended. It just...
I have a copy of Joan Didion's new book "Notes to John" sitting on my desk.
There’s a moment in Hal Ashby’s “Shampoo” (1975) where the camera floats with a detached observational air over Beverly Hills; it captures not...
"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, blossoms in the summer, and fades away in October." -- Bart...
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. -- Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life" There's a strange TV series called "Severance,"...
I've always felt sorry for Yoko Ono.
"Who controls the past controls the future.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ...''
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
Townes Van Zandt would have turned 80 earlier this year.
There are disasters you remember because they are too big, too loud, too public to forget. Then there are the ones that vanish, not because they...