Every family has its holiday rituals. One of the best-loved in mine is the annual New Year’s Day lists. We sit around the kitchen table with cans of soda and slices of pizza, announce our picks for the 10 best books we read and the 10 best movies we saw in the past year, then […]

Compiling a year-end „best-of” list is a tradition for most critics, but it has also become something of a tradition to adopt a tone of lofty, humorous disdain while offering them (I think of this style as New York Times Modern). „What a very silly thing to be doing,” the critic seems to be saying, […]

The last time I monopolized this space at the back of the magazine, I wrote about pet peeves and petty annoyances, but now it’s the Thanksgiving season, and time to turn the flip side. I can usually find about five things that cheer me up for every one that pisses me off, and I think […]

Pop culture is full of pleasures, but it also has its share of annoyances; for every pretty, talented Elisha Cuthbert there is a Paris Hilton (and her little dog, too). We soldier on bravely in spite of this, but sometimes it helps to unbutton that stiff upper lip and verbalize. In that spirit, I offer […]

„Just so you know,” Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines told a concert audience in March of 2003, „we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” The result was immediate. Many fans called for a boycott of the Chicks’ music, and not a few country – music stations were happy to comply; […]

I’m writing this on the 27th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, and I can still remember what a shock it was to walk into the house and hear he had left the building for good. That his death was next door to natural made it somehow even more jarring. He hadn’t perished in a car […]

I love the movies, let’s get that up front. Have since I was a kid. And I’m from an unsophisticated school of thought that believes a movie (always a movie and never a film, even if it comes with subtitles) should be fun before it’s anything else: an ice cream cone for the brain. Because […]

As April of this year passed and I got more and more Kingdom Hospital DVDs marked „domestic broadcast version,” two things became apparent to me. The first was that the shows were getting steadily better. The second – by tax day it could no longer be denied – was that we were going down the […]

One night not too long ago, I agreed to do an appearance for a film society in upstate New York. They were showing Cujo, one of my favorites among the films made from my books and stories. They took me out to dinner beforehand (if you don’t take a fee – which I usually don’t […]

Want some good news? Can’t help you, haven’t had any in years. Good eats? Nah, if your house is like my house, everybody’s watching their calories. Good TV? Sorry, but both Friends and The Sopranos are outta here, and Kingdom Hospital is going too, alas (more on that another time). Good movies? Fuhgeddaboudit, it’s almost […]