John Powers

Let me begin with a confession. Winona Ryder once leaned over a table and said to me, ”Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like Steve McQueen?“ In that moment I grasped why Ryder has such a reputation as a man-killer. Not only was she flirtatious, she was......

Near the beginning of MTV’s Be Heard: A Global Discussion With Colin Powell, a beaming Norwegian girl asked the secretary of state how he felt about representing a country perceived as the Satan of world politics. Powell leaned back slightly in his dark suit (his military bearing a bit softer......

Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless. Why not? Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of your labor . . . --Langston Hughes, ”Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria“ When the hijacked jets struck Manhattan and Washington, D.C., one of the indirect victims was the......

“The Congo is a remarkably beautiful place,” purred wry Aaron Brown last week, introducing a report on the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo, “so it’s a shame we tend to only go there when disaster happens.” CNN‘s shame didn’t last long, however, and soon we were given the dazzling son et......

A couple of weeks ago, the History Channel reran an old episode of Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War. I hadn‘t seen Vietnam footage for a long time and was startled by how different war coverage looked in 1968 -- it moved so much closer to the action. Cameramen dashed......

When the Houston-based energy giant Enron filed for Chapter 11 on December 2 -- ravaging most of its employees, even as its bosses rolled in hundreds of millions -- it seemed that Bush would finally have to pay the piper. Enron was his biggest financial backer (over $2 million), its......

Illustration by Peter Bennett 1. Al(most) President. First, it turned out that poor Gore was robbed in the election (the press recount showed that more Florida voters cast ballots for him than for Bush). Then the big networks and papers pretended exactly the opposite (they were busy turning our new......

A BEAUTIFUL MIND | Directed by RON HOWARD | Written by AKIVA GOLDSMAN Based on the book by SYLVIA NASAR | Produced by BRIAN GRAZER | Released by Universal At the Avco and AMC Century 14 THE SHIPPING NEWS | Directed by LASSE HALLSTROM | Written by ROBERT NELSON JACOBS......

Jean-Luc Godard once explained that commercials are only 30 seconds long because after that they’d have to start telling the truth about the product. George W. Bush‘s handlers obviously view their president in the same light. These days, his media presence is largely limited to walking across the White House......