John Powers

Illustration by Ryan Ward Having evidently missed all the coverage of the 2003 recall, last Sunday’s New York Times ran a story on how Arnold Schwarzenegger promotes his politics the same way he did The Terminator. Modest as ever, Duh Gubna was eager to share his crowd-pleasing secrets — how......

Illustration by Mr. Fish In The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein tells the story of Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the House, listening to a pre-Monica State of the Union address. As the Man From Hope effortlessly dominated the chamber — in part by appropriating conservative......

Illustration by Ryan Ward Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. —Susan Sontag TV may not have a clue how to cover the death of a famous intellectual, but an epochal tsunami sure makes it feel right at home. Within hours......

10. The End Is Endlessly Nigh. When Janet Jackson’s bare breast made its special guest appearance at the Super Bowl, the postgame -hysteria made you understand why H.L. Mencken coined the term "booboisie." Networks replayed the footage over and over. The right organized an e-mail campaign by parents shocked that......

If television relishes anything more than a high-speed car chase, it’s a churning mass of humanity. The networks spent 10 days replaying footage of Ron Artest’s two-fisted foray into the Detroit Pistons’ drunken fan base. Such a brawl made great TV, but about the 10th time you saw it, the......

Illustration by Peter Bennett When the jury reached its verdict in the Scott Peterson trial — any fertilizer salesman with that many hairstyles had to be guilty — you could hear the cable-news honchos cheering all the way from Redwood City. After months of the same old Laci-Scott-Amber triangulation, the......

Although I can’t tell you the exact time — it was after I decided that Wolf Blitzer should be hung by his beard, but before Fox News (again!) became the first network to call the decisive state for Bush — I remember thinking that the lesson of the 2004 campaign......

Illustration by Peter Bennett I told them, “Tomorrow, I’ll go back to being funny, but your show will still blow.” —Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, Monday, October 18 The striking thing about Jon Stewart’s slash-and-burn appearance on CNN’s Crossfire wasn’t that he accused the show of “hurting America,” dubbed......

Illustration by Ryan Ward Halfway into last Sunday night’s episode of ABC’s campy Desperate Housewives — which had the trained ecstatics at Entertainment Weekly crying “Hosanna!” before the second episode even aired — Teri Hatcher’s character, Susan, made a catty joke about her trampy rival, Edie, to the local busybody......

Illustration by Peter Bennett Being every bit as low-minded as the next media whore, I raced through Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty in search of the nasty factoids that Kelley always serves up like so many canapés. Who wouldn’t love the idea that, back......