John Powers

A DARKLY IMAGINED SAGA OF REALLY, REALLY mean streets, Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York begins with a prologue of appalling violence. The year is 1846 and two hostile local militias are fighting for control of Five Points, a lumpen corner of downtown Manhattan crawling with vice, criminality and Darwinian......

One sweltering afternoon in Ho Chi Minh City, known to the kids there as HCMC, I was heading up Dong Khoi, the legendary downtown street that, like a happy love affair, begins at a hotel and ends at a church. A 6-year-old boy in a faded Adidas T-shirt followed me......

Illustration by Peter Bennett Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. --George Orwell LONG BEFORE THE REPUBLICANS' VICTORY ON NOVEMBER 5, GEORGE BUSH was already tormenting his opponents......

Back in the waning days of the Brazilian dictatorship, hundreds of thousands of citizens, including some of my friends, attended a huge pro-democracy demonstration in Sao Paulo. On that night’s national newscasts, one major network ignored the rally completely while another broadcast footage suggesting it had attracted only a meager,......

As I said this morning to Charlie There is far too much music in Bali --Noel Coward When the bombs went off in Bali on October 12, killing nearly 200 and obliterating two Kuta Beach nightclubs, two things strikingly did not happen. President Bush didn‘t so much as mutter the......

So here comes Paul Schrader -- father to America‘s craziest taxi driver and its unhappiest gigolo -- off to do the DVD commentary for his new movie, Auto Focus. He’s clad in a yellow polo shirt, s “You have to be happy with that,” I venture, and he just shakes......

At the Barcelona airport a few days ago, I overheard a young American businessman extolling the Catalan capital’s virtues to his newly arrived pals: “This is the best fuckin‘ party city in the world. You get home at 4:30 -- in the afternoon -- and the women are unbelievably sexy......