3 December 2020 James Wolcott Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.
3 December 2020 James Wolcott It’s the contemporary woman that movies don’t know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.
3 December 2020 James Wolcott As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects – digitize and dematerialize – we approach a ‘Star Trek’ future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles.
3 December 2020 James Wolcott The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.
3 December 2020 James Wolcott High expectations weren’t nurtured in my neck of nowhere back then – children weren’t fawned over from an early age as ‘gifted’ and groomed for a prizewinning future self-esteem was considered something you had to pick from the garden yourself.
3 December 2020 James Wolcott Who elected Larry King America’s grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.
3 December 2020 James Wolcott Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.
3 December 2020 James Wolcott After a decade this glum, we deserved a shot of ‘Glee,’ a show that restored our faith in the power of song, the beauty of dance, and the magic of ‘spirit fingers’ to chase our cares and woes into somebody else’s backyard.
3 December 2020 James Wolcott A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.
