Visual Metaphor of the Day
Ann Coulter's Terrible New Trump Book
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today, Ann Coulter published her latest book, sure to be another best-seller: In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome. I know, the very stupid subtitle makes no sense, in Latin or English, because Coulter hates immigrants and thinks America is being destroyed by too much “pluribus.” Maybe her publisher thought “Unum…
Quotation of the Day
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH “Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as…
Murder Is Our Peculiar Pastime: Fifty Notable American Crime Novels: 23-24
BY MARTIN KICH Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Knopf, 1930. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was not the first hardboiled detective novel. That distinction is commonly accorded to John Daly’s first Race Williams novel, Knights of the Open Palm (1923). But The Maltese Falcon and its film adaptation gave the sub-genre international exposure…
Murder Is Our Peculiar Pastime: Fifty Notable American Crime Novels: 21-22
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Gardner, Erle Stanley. The Case of the Crooked Candle. New York: Morrow, 1944. Erle Stanley Gardner was not the first mystery-suspense novelist to create a protagonist who was a lawyer. But his most famous creation, Perry Mason, has become the prototype for other criminal attorneys in the genre—so much so that…
Trump on Citizen Kane
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is from an article in the series The Trump Files being published online by Mother Jones: “Donald Trump’s favorite movie is Citizen Kane, the 1941 film about a publishing tycoon mogul who surrounds himself with material luxury but struggles to find happiness. ‘I loved Orson Welles,’ Trump told Bloomberg‘s Timothy O’Brien. ‘He was…
The New Oprah?
BY MARTIN KICH The White House has released the books on President Obama’s “Summer Reading List”; Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald Seveneves by Neal Stephenson None of the books are explicitly being recommended by the President, but…
We May Be Better Off Not Knowing the Details
More Presidential Campaign Usage Policing
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This from CNN: “After Hillary Clinton’s controversy over her private email use, running mate Tim Kaine told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that the two would be ‘real transparent’ in the White House. ‘She said it was a mistake,’ Kaine said. ‘I am not presumptuous enough to start thinking about how I’m going…