The Hours follows a single day in the lives of three women—the author Virginia Woolf; Laura Brown, a pregnant stay-at-home mom living in a California suburb in the 1950s; and Clarissa Vaughan, a book editor in modern-day New York City. There is a fourth character, Laura’
It was probably a coincidence that the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decisions on two same-sex marriage cases just days before the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, but it was a nice touch. Everything I might have wanted to say about it has already been said better by
There’s nothing about the cream linen suit Jake Gittes wears in the opening scenes of Chinatown that suggests he’s a private eye. It’s 1937 Los Angeles, and he’s showing graphic photos of a couple having sex in the woods to a distraught husband, but Gittes is
I’ve spent much of the past week and a half stuck in much-worse-than-usual traffic, and thinking about Kevin Fanning’s pitch-perfect meditation on commuting: How the Dead Live. “Thinking about the clock of my life ticking away every day while I’m sitting there, just
Although the jingle-belled codpieces of the 1540s and the disco suits of the 1970s were something special, my vote for the silliest decade in Western men’s fashion is the 1660s. It was an age of voluminous pirate shirts, elaborate, waist-length wigs, high-heeled shoes, enormous feathered hats,
A few weeks after the Obama administration was thumped for subpoenaing Associated Press phone records and monitoring the communications of Fox News reporter James Rosen, word arrived from the Guardian that the administration executed an unusually broad FISA warrant for Verizon call metadata (and grudging props to the Brits for
I Am Love is a modern melodrama tracing how Emma Recchi, the Russian wife of a fabulously wealthy Italian industrialist, falls out of love with her husband and in love with a chef who is one of her adult son’s best friends. The film is vaguely set in the
At least one of three heavily timber-producing counties in Oregon last week rejected property tax increases to pay for law enforcement services that had previously been funded by federal timber subsidies. Without the levies, those counties had to lay off 80 percent of their police forces and only offer
{image-1} While The King and I’s Anna never dropped a single bead of sweat or snagged a single thread while negotiating the palace of Siam, The Last of the Mohicans’ Cora and Alice Munro’s dresses get torn to shreds as the sisters hack through the forests and
Seeing the tornado damage in Oklahoma this week reminded me of the aftermath of a thousand-year flood that struck my city three years ago. My husband and I had three sandbags, which was ridiculous. What piece of our house were we going to save with three sandbags? (We laid
