John Powers

Weapons of Mass Distraction

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett Last Friday night on the Eric Rudolph Channel, er, CNN, anchor Aaron Brown finally devoted a few minutes to covering the FCC vote that was just about to hand over still more of our publicly owned airwaves to that nice Mr. Murdoch. His guests, right-wing pundit......
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The 10 Most Influential Books of the Past Year

John Powers
Lists are the junk food of journalism — that’s what they run in Entertainment Weekly when the editors can’t think of anything else — and books are a serious matter. But junk food can be awfully tasty, and recently I found myself wondering, What were the most influential books that......

Stuck in the middle with Neo

John Powers
I caught an opening-weekend show of X2, and the audience shivered with genuine excitement just once — during the trailer for The Matrix Reloaded. And why not? When The Matrix came out four years ago, it made most of Hollywood feel suddenly antiquated. The movie was an exuberantly mulched blend......

George of the Jungle

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett When George Bush made his daredevil landing last week on the USS Abraham Lincoln — an aircraft carrier obviously chosen to give him some Great Emancipator mojo — the event’s iconography came straight from Top Gun, but its essence was worthy of Hot Shots! Everyone knew......

Y Tu Grandmamá También

John Powers
While most rookie directors are happy to get good reviews, a rare few want nothing less than to wow the immortals. Thirty-one-year-old Carlos Reygadas is unabashedly one of the latter, and has the talent to match his ambition. His debut feature, Japón, isn’t just the wildest eruption of the current......

Superspreaders

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett In a memorable passage in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera observed that over the previous two centuries the European blackbird had abandoned the woods and begun inhabiting cities. This invasion of the human world, he concluded, was a profound planetary change, reminding us......
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The Dorky, the Docile and the Dead

John Powers
Better Luck Tomorrow, a zippy black comedy about brainy Asian-American teens in gated Orange County suburbs, has a sly opening hook. Its sweet-faced hero, Ben (Parry Shen), and his tightly wound pal Virgil (Jason Tobin) are sunbathing in the back yard when they hear a cell phone twittering. But where?......

Soldiers of Fortune 500

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett Thousands of Marines have been given a pamphlet called "A Christian's Duty," a mini prayer book which includes a tear-out section to be mailed to the White House pledging the soldier who sends it in has been praying for Bush. —ABC News Online, March 30 Several......

The Logo-Spangled Banner

John Powers
Illustration by Dana Collins From new transmitters come old stupidities. —Bertolt Brecht On Saturday morning in L.A., just after nightfall in Baghdad, I clicked on the television, and seeing the already-familiar image of that city shrouded in darkness and silence, felt sure that it was about to be bombed. I......

The Big What If?

John Powers
Illustration by Peter Bennett There are no knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns — that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know, but there are also unknown unknowns — things we do not know we don't know......