Tag: turning point
‘Shōgun’ Is Challenging Hollywood’s Most Revered Stereotype
Most American audiences have probably never seen Hiroyuki Sanada without a sword in his hand. The illustrious Japanese actor has, since making his international film debut in 2003’s The Last Samurai, practically cornered the Hollywood market on playing yakuza bosses and samurai warriors. Look, there he is, facing off against Hawkeye. There he goes, defending John Wick. And, oh, who’s that guy Brad Pitt just brushed past aboard a bullet train? Sanada, again with a blade.
It’s no
David Brooks: The New Old Age
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Anne Kenner worked for many years as a federal prosecutor, first in the Eastern District of New York, and then in the Northern District of California, trying mobsters and drug dealers. “I like the hairy edge,” she told me. Her job was meaningful to her; it made
The Women of Rural America Are Dying Too Young
“Boy crazy” was what people called it. “She was so boy crazy,” I would hear about my girlfriends. I never heard the reverse, that a boy was “girl crazy.” Girls having crushes, sneaking out at night to have fun: It seems innocent enough. But in my small, conservative town, a “wrong” choice at a young age could cut girls off from their future dreams, leaving them mired in despair.
Growing up in the ’90s in Clinton, Arkansas, all that
America’s in the Midst of a Socioeconomic Shift
What we need next is more new construction.
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Question of the Week
How have cars shaped your life, and/or what do you think about their future? (I’m eager to hear
COVID Science Is Moving Backwards
Paul Sax is an infectious-disease physician and professor at Harvard Medical School. Even so, when Sax’s kids asked him whether they should get the updated COVID vaccine this fall, he wasn’t really sure what to tell them. His two children are in their 20s, healthy, and at no special risk of complications from disease. Each had recovered from COVID, and thus, he reasoned, had extra immunity on top of what they’d gotten from their prior shots. Another injection would
The Western Mythmaking of Jane Campion’s ‘The Power of the Dog’
In the last 30 years, two Westerns have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and both redefined that most American of genres. When Clint Eastwood’s brutally revisionist Unforgiven won in 1993, it marked a turning point for films that had long idealized frontier violence. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men then won in 2008, defining modern Westerns beyond the typical 19th-century setting.
And now in 2022, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is the most Oscar-nominated
Will Omicron Leave Most of Us Immune?
Even before Omicron hit the United States in full force, most of our bodies had already wised up to SARS-CoV-2’s insidious spike—through infection, injection, or both. By the end of October 2021, some 86.2 percent of American immune systems may have glimpsed the virus’s most infamous protein, according to one estimate; now, as Omicron adds roughly 800,000 known cases to the national roster each day, the cohort of spike-zero Americans, the truly immunologically naive, is shrinking fast. Virginia Pitzer,
Bob Corker on the Future of the Republican Party
Senator Bob Corker had just gotten out of a hot-yoga session with his wife on a Sunday morning in 2017 when his phone started blowing up. President Donald Trump was tweeting about him, falsely claiming that the Tennessee Republican supported the Iran deal (he did not) and that he had begged Trump for a reelection endorsement (Corker says he never did such a thing). “I got to my house, and I was dripping wet, standing in my closet, getting undressed
Black Theologian Esau McCaulley on Christianity and Racism
Esau McCaulley has been caught between multiple identities his whole life. Family legend has it that his grandfather couldn’t read, and when it came time to pick a baby name for McCaulley’s father, that grandfather opened the Bible and pointed to a word, not realizing it was Esau. It’s no accident that there aren’t that many baby Esaus crawling around: In the Bible, the “red” and “hairy” Esau is most notable for selling his birthright to his brother for