Nation Topics - Arts and Entertainment | The Nation

Thanks to the genius of millions, who over the generations have created our language, we may speak of the most uncanny experience in terms that suit the most common.

Tom Waits is an imaginary hobo. He cruises the oddball corners of American pop culture, collecting the deft and moving and loopy short takes he sees and imagines there.

I coined the term "global brunch" several years ago after seeing a film of the Stravinsky-Cocteau Oedipus Rex as staged by Julie Taymor.

Hark! The squeal of the two-headed amphibian. Mating season must have begun.

After we admit that all historical circumstances are specific and all sufferings absolute--that Serbian "police" are not Nazis and ethnic Albanians not Jews (and NATO forces cannot be compared p

Like a guest at a potlatch, laughing to see his host's worldly goods go up in flames, I roared at The Matrix--roared and at the same time was humbled, knowing Warner Bros.

Like the telephone before it, television has been an instrument for overcoming American loneliness.

Most Americans don't like instrumental music.

"I am it."

When those in my modest circle of acquaintances learned that I was editing a Hollywood issue of The Nation, they found it either risible or irritating.