Prim, preppy, and proper; sometimes stylish, sometimes snobbish; always, to use the marketing term, classic: these are people’s commonly if vaguely held impressions of the game of tennis.  Each new group of rebels, from the tennis brats (led by McEnroe, Vilas and Connors), to the young, peroxided Agassi, to the country-club scandalizing Williams sisters, stand…

Here’s a several trillion dollar question: what really happened in Ohio in November? But it’s also a dangerous question, because it leads to: does anyone know? Is the bramble of tales of what went on too overgrown for us ever to know? And the answer to those is, of course, hopelessly uncertain. Epistemological certainty is…

Critics generally praised Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds for its cinematic virtuosity, citing the panache of his staging of fearful chases, narrow escapes, and random annihilation. This may be true, but the movie still struck me as reheated. Spielberg has done these things much more effectively in other movies – a scene in which…

One of the most shortsighted commonsense expressions in use today must be ‘ethnic food,’ as in ‘What are you in the mood for tonight?’  ‘Something ethnic?’  As a shorthand for classifying cuisines, it’s pretty incoherent, lumping together the foods of whichever nations or cultures are considered to be non-standard.  This consensus is, of course, temporary:…

In a recent article in The New Republic, Rochelle Gurstein argues that those who find formal aesthetic appeal in ‘postmodern art’ are ‘comically’ mistaken, since they are mistakenly looking for beauty in objects whose intent is solely conceptual. Therefore, she writes, an art dealer who admires a smudged Warhol silkscreen for its aesthetic qualities is…