The Jesus People experience proved to be a staging area for tens of thousands of young Americans who were making up their mind about marriage, schooling, and careers
Hardcore groups were singing songs about Ronald Reagan. I wasn't interested in this and preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture. I suppose you could say that Sonic Youth was always trying to def...
So pervasively has Enlightenment culture’s anti-supernaturalism affected the Western church, especially educated European and North American Christians, that most of us are suspicious of anything supernatural.
Only one president in this book was a supervillain. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Chester A. Arthur, the Lex Luthor of the American Presidency.
But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighte...
The highways of American cities are an enduring testimony to our acceptance of ugliness
A blanket could be used to put the war in warm. Just paint the blanket like an American flag, and then try to convince the world that they are cold and need us to stop shivering. But before you do, consider they aren’t shivering from cold—they ar...
I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial ext...
You can't kill an American Citizen without benefit of a trial." "I can if you're on the list, traitor." "LIST? What list? What the hell are you talking about?" BLACK LIST, July 24
In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.
I think 'Gatsby' is hobbled, in part, by its status as a Great American Novel. People kind of roll their eyes before they've even opened it, treat it with a 'been there, done that' attitude. I know I did. It took me years to re-open the novel and see...
I like England more than I did when I left. It's become a bit of a better country in the last ten years, in the attitude of it. A bit more Americanized, which is both good and bad. At least when you order a cup of coffee they don't give you a hard ti...
I came to think that nobody from England could draw American comic books, because they were clearly all done by this sort of Mafia, all these guys with Italian and Irish names who had the whole thing sewn up. It was actually seeing a comic book drawn...
I was influenced by Ray Harryhausen and Lotte Reiniger, with her twitchy, cutout animation, which I happened to see at a very young age, but also by the Warner Bros. cartoons, 'Tom and Jerry,' and of course Disney. And also by Fellini's 'Giulietta of...
I was a strange, dark little dude. I fell in love with horror movies, at a very early age. Somehow, as a first grader, I was able to convince my parents to let me go see stuff like 'An American Werewolf in London' in theaters, so I was headed in that...
The U.S. might enjoy overwhelming military advantage, but its relative economic power, which in the long run is almost invariably decisive, is in decline. The interregnum after the Cold War, far from being the prelude to a new American age, was beari...
By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
In an instant, the law was transformed: from the last passenger on the safe-haven bandwagon to a pioneer into uncharted territory. For the first time in American history, it was not only legal to relinquish a baby; in Nebraska, it was okay to abandon...
Americans different in some maybe thoughts or emphasis still have the same ideas. They want a government that lets them be free, that leaves them alone, that doesn't interrupt and interfere with every aspect of their life, that lets them go to work a...
It was really cool to work with Dakota Fanning. I've watched her grow up and I've always loved her films, loved her. It was amazing working with someone who was American as well, because obviously it's going to be a different energy straightaway. We ...
Florence Nightingale was an amazing figure. She created the American Red Cross. She saw the suffering from bad health conditions on the battlefield and in the military hospitals, and she fought like crazy to change the conditions; to make sure that t...
