Articles Tagged with #opinions
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The National Desk
Bad Land
America is full of guns—one gun for every citizen—and Americans often use them to shoot one another. After this week’s failure of gun-control legislation to survive the Senate, it’s not enough anymore to say Americans love their guns. The question is: Why do we kill?
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Opinions
A Spot for Tea
It’s easy to hate Starbucks until you admit it’s responsible for nearly everything good in today’s coffee culture. Now the behemoth is poised, with a recent acquisition, to introduce America to hundreds of years of tea culture. A tea maker is grateful.
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Guides
The 2012 Good Gift Games
Oh look, it’s the holidays and time to interact with humans again. Thankfully, there are board games to facilitate or replace conversation. Here are 10 of the year’s best to get you started.
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Roundtables
The Master and Moviemaking
Once again, we convene our film scholars, plus critic Michelle Orange, to discuss a major movie: The Master, by Paul Thomas Anderson—a masterpiece of craftsmanship, or merely an exercise of cinema and violence with no story in the center?
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Punchlines
Dark Material
There is a brand of humor with an inherent meaning so dark that, even though we may wish we hadn’t laughed, we’re programmed to think it’s funny. An explanation of a joke about a pedophile.
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Opinions
A Coalition of Dunces
Last week, the Pulitzer Prize board refused to give its prestigious award to any novel published in 2011. Something is clearly broken. We roused our commentators from the Tournament of Books, Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner, for their remarks.
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Opinions
Enjoy the Silence
Just because no one uses payphones doesn’t mean the phone booth needs to go the way of the dodo. One man’s plea for preserving society’s greatest unused invention.
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Guides
The 2011 Good Gift Games
The problem with a trip down memory lane is that it might strand you in Candyland. Here are 10 new games well worth remembering.
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Opinions
Rising Up at Ground Zero
Construction continues at the new World Trade Center—as does criticism of the approved designs. But a look deep inside the new structure shows the progress so far has proven to be in exactly the right direction.
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Cosmology on the Brain
Special Topics in Mindboggling Physics
Popular science books are all well and good until they ask you to picture a hundred cats playing volleyball in the fourteenth dimension. Writing lessons for astrophysicists.
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Democratic Vistas
Poetry for the Age of American Decline
Poetry can provide solace. It can also remind people to quit freaking out. Poems selected for Congress, nervous shoppers, Maureen Dowd, and the President of the United States.
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Letters From Lebanon
Beirut, Texas
Political candidates who want to burn down Washington, DC, perhaps should see what a country looks like with no effective government.