You're sort of programmed a certain way because of your environment. That's all you know. But we don't have that anymore because of the internet. Because of the internet we're all communicating with each other all across the board, so you're getting ...
What's happening to movie critics is no different from what has been meted out to book, dance, theater, and fine-arts reviewers and reporters in the cultural deforestation that has driven refugees into the diffuse clatter of the Internet and Twitter,...
I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt ...
Good art requires the examination of faith issues from a variety of perspectives and voices. Yet for many audience members, the only way a film can be “Christian” is if there is a major altar-call type scene with a dramatic conversion. If the mov...
The real debate about both the horrific inequality in the world and about the terrorism and frightening instability in the world requires analysis of the differences in upset-adaption or alienation-from-soul between individuals, races, genders, gener...
I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in ...
With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the ...
I could fill my whole time doing interviews, speaking to crowds, and there's this natural human tendency because of our culture to think that the more people I talk to, the bigger the impact I'll have, and yet Jesus didn't spend His time just speakin...
Most modern science fiction went to school on 'Dune.' Even 'Harry Potter' with its 'boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny' shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered...
Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in...
At the limit it could be said that every speaking being has a personal language of his own, that is his own particular way of thinking and feeling. Culture, at its various levels, unifies in a series of strata, to the extent that they come into conta...
The complex mix of unique people rising from different identities, beliefs, education, gender, upbringing, point of views and ethnicity have unequal sense in their impact in other’s status, opportunities, resources, talents, skills and productivity...
When I was prosecutor we had truancy and curfew issues and we made a refrigerator magnet, and that was hot with parents. They loved putting it up on the wall and saying, you know, if you don't follow these rules, you could get prosecuted. Whether or ...
Interesting point of view is to see humankind and its history as dysfunctional humanity, from very beginnings of first cultural traits up to this very day. It has been a long path of becoming. I am in search of a map that explains this dysfunctionali...
Constantly exposing yourself to popular culture and the mass media will ultimately shape your reality tunnel in ways that are not necessarily conducive to achieving your Soul Purpose and Life Calling. Modern society has generally ‘lost the plot’....
But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that...
Animals have come to mean so much in our lives. We live in a fragmented and disconnected culture. Politics are ugly, religion is struggling, technology is stressful, and the economy is unfortunate. What's one thing that we have in our lives that we c...
When the 2008 victory of Barack Obama and the defeat of grumpy old John McCain began looking, um, inevitable, I started fielding inquiries about whether 'Nixonland' - the name of the book I published that spring about the origins of the generation of...
I am truly multi-racial. I never knew my biological father. I've always had less information than I would have liked to have had. All I know from my mother is that I have connections to many different cultures.
We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the...
You meet me after school right here", I said. "Why?" he asked. I couldn't believe he was so stupid. "Because we're going to finish this fight." "You're crazy," Roger said. He got to his feet and walked away. His gang stared at me like I was a serail ...
