John Powers

The Rise of Anthony Lane

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett BACK IN THE 1960s, THE SITUATIONIST THINKER Guy Debord declared that modern society is built around spectacles that create mass passivity. I always thought this was laying it on a bit thick, but lately I'm not so sure. I'm not talking here about how we're letting......

Bubble Wrap

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett An audience is like a broad. If you're indifferent, Endsville. --Frank Sinatra AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER THE NATION HAS been the journalistic lodestar of the American left. Now, in its 137th year, the magazine is on a commercial roll. Its subscriptions have risen......

Devil's Bargain

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett LATE ONE NIGHT IN THE SPRING OF 1978, I WAS SITTING in the railway station of a small English town waiting for a train that had been delayed for hours. On the next bench was a 40-ish man in a black leather jacket. "You have a......

Crap Circles

John Powers
The best moment in Signs, a new thriller that offers a faith-based approach to intergalactic warfare, comes in its opening scene. Mel Gibson plays a lapsed minister who jerks awake in his bed at dawn‘s early light. Unable to find his children in the house, he heads outside and races......

The Summer of Stolen Children

John Powers
Deep into The Lovely Bones, the new best-seller by Alice Sebold, the novel‘s narrator -- a 14-year-old named Susie Salmon who has been raped and murdered by a serial killer -- gazes down at her neighborhood from heaven. “Our house looked the same as every other one on the block,”......

Doomsday Machine

John Powers
Ever since the collapse of communism, American pop culture has pulsed with nostalgia for the Cold War, exploring its currents and backwaters in story after story -- be it Joseph Kanon evoking partitioned Berlin in his novel The Good German, Kevin Costner tackling the Cuban Missile Crisis in Thirteen Days......
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Spiking the Punch

John Powers
Last Friday night on Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor turned its two-fisted gaze on the week‘s most incendiary news footage -- the video of Inglewood police officer Jeremy Morse roughing up 16-year-old Donovan Jackson. The great O’Reilly was taking the day off, but fill-in (and former Republican congressman) John Kasich......
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American Idols

John Powers
A few weeks after the death of John Cassavetes in 1989, I was out drinking with an Australian documentarian who toasted the late filmmaker for never selling out. ”Say what you will about him,“ Dennis bellowed, ”you have to admit that he stayed the distance.“ I thought of these words......

Crime Wave

John Powers
Last week on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart was chatting with 2020‘s Cynthia McFadden about the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, the Salt Lake City teen whose family is almost parodically all-American. ”Do you think they’re getting all this coverage because they‘re“ -- he jokingly whispered it -- ”whiteys?“ McFadden looked......

Majority Report

John Powers
You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood. --Philip K. Dick Back in the mid-1950s, Philip K. Dick dashed off ”The Minority Report,“ a clever, ungainly short story......