Search Results for:

cheap one way airline tickets to newark phone number 1-800-299-7264

Trump’s Easter Egg Roll: Inauthentic Christianity in a Bunny Suit

…r the children of atheist lesbian couples are simply not welcome here. The cheap paperback Easter stories read by Sanders and Conway—no doubt ordered the day before from Amazon Prime—had nothing to do with teaching, or welcoming, or even celebrating a Christian holiday (inappropriate as that itself would have been at a White House event). As this administration did with its craven and phony defense of “Merry Christmas” as if it were an endangered…

Read More

Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

…economic hierarchicalism that pervades this attitude. Somewhere along the way, Republicans went from Reagan’s belief that maybe the government should step off the necks of the wealthy a little, to Trump’s brag that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, to the more up-to-date proclamation that the economy should reopen to save the stock market, even if it meant potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths. Some of them really…

Read More

Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Avatar and the Myth of Originality

…s. Writing in the New York Times last week, Dave Itzkoff outlined the many ways in which James Cameron’s Avatar has been praised and/or condemned, the ways viewers have interpreted the movie as an allegory for this or that, the way it might even serve as a “Rorschach test for your personal interests and anxieties.” Indeed, it is a curious phenomenon. Not unlike staring at the clouds. But, how and why does Avatar evoke such a variety of responses?…

Read More

Noah v. Kitschy Jesus: A Tale of Two Movies

…ect kitsch and its quasi-fascistic associations. Feel this way, think this way, act this way—no! It took another several years before I really understood that some people, perhaps most people, never went through this quintessentially sophomoric phase. Oddly, they seemed not to have read Clement Greenberg. They liked Norman Rockwell unironically. They still looked at “abstract” art and said “my pet could do that.” They listened to Richard Marx. Thi…

Read More

Lindsey Graham’s Lying “Eye-ranians”

…rd is a real American, because Bill Gates is American. Those of you using iPhones, by the way, are probably Iranians and should be detained or deported. Because Steve Jobs was part Syrian, and Syria is part Iranian, which means your iPhone auto-correct is lying to you. Come to think of it, how do we know Lindsey Graham is not lying to us? How do we know Lindsey Graham’s not an Iranian? What if he’s the Manchurian—or should I say Mazandaranian!—can…

Read More

Pop-Eye: Meat The Wrestler

…ronofsky’s tale is disinvested of tacky teardrops falling from the sky and cheap-trick resurrections. The reason reviewers passed over the religious is not simply, I suspect, because of religious illiteracy, but because of the received wisdom of late-modern culture that continues to dwell on a body-soul dualism, with the soul in power, the body a mere marionette. Several of the religious review sites described Randy’s body in metaphorical terms: R…

Read More

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

…dless of their…profession,” but I somehow doubt that sanitation workers outnumber investment bankers in SoulCycle studios (one of which is across the street from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Tribeca). Classes with popular instructors sell out in minutes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get priority booking. “Ultimately, this is what brand religion is all about: stoking emotion with a combination of scarcity and urgenc…

Read More

The Social Science Animal: Brooks Argues for Emotion over Reason

…But instead of inspiring figures of human potential, they come off more as cheap foils that Brooks is using to market his theories to the wealthy, literate class of policy wonks that he hopes will take his ideas seriously. More, Brooks is no Rousseau. And no novelist. If there is something mildly, warmly inspiring about his theoretical claims, they fall flat when explored through the medium of these sadly hollow characters. Brooks is perhaps best…

Read More

Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

…olic in its goals and orientations. But while those protests multiplied in number, and continue still, they were drowned out by the hosannas of Ronald Reagan’s America™. If burning children are the price paid for our stock portfolios or geopolitical advantage, well, just keep smiling, America. The whole world is now the land of burning children. So, too, has America’s never-ending war (who are we fighting now, again?) marched on. There is fire in…

Read More

The Problem with Christian Gentlemen: A Short Goodbye to Ted Cruz, the “Mr. Pecksniff” of Presidential Politics

…is rationalizing his decision to pimp out his younger daughter at a rather cheap dowry price to a rich but grotesquely uncouth suitor: All his life long he had been walking up and down the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in one hand and a crook in the other, scraping all sorts of valuable odds and ends into his pouch. Now, there being a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow, it follows (so Mr. Pecksniff, and only such admirable men, w…

Read More