Essays
1097 results
Page 106
My digital camera, myself
Hallelujah! No longer must I wonder if I’m in focus, if anyone blinked or whether my exposure was correct. And I can make my own prints, to my own idiosyncratic taste, without losing anything in the translation to some middleman.
Essays
4 minute read
Barry Bonds as drug scapegoat
Barry Bonds’s home run record has called attention to his likely use of illegal steroids. How many other lower-profile needle secrets of professional sports have been swept under the carpet? And why aren’t sportswriters and talk show hosts asking that question?
Essays
4 minute read
Let's talk about Jane Smiley's writing
I used to love Jane Smiley’s writing. Then she started posting on the Internet, revealing herself as yet another example of a writer who desperately needs an editor.
George W. Bush meets Oscar Wilde
Has any artist noticed, as I have, George W. Bush’s facial transformations since he first appeared on the national stage eight years ago?
Essays
1 minute read
Five stages of 'The Sopranos'
The final episode of “The Sopranos” did something that always leaves me feeling a little prickly. It forced me to look at myself -- which isn’t ordinarily why I turn on the TV.
Watch the last scene below.
Watch the last scene below.
Essays
4 minute read
Where Don Imus went wrong
The recent downfall of radio shock jock Don Imus was a tragedy of poetic dimensions. BSR contributor and playwright Ted Hechtman rises to the challenge.
Essays
1 minute read
Florida's NCAA basketball victory
As this year’s NCAA championship game wore on, it became clear that Florida was a basketball team, whereas Ohio State was merely an arsenal of impressive individuals.
Essays
6 minute read
The singular life of George Seldes
From World War I to the Age of Nader, the outspoken Philadelphia journalist and critic George Seldes survived more than a century and managed to reach the finish line with his principles intact. How did he do it, and how can we emulate his example?
Essays
6 minute read
Religious relics
Once you start collecting relics, there's no stopping the imaginatively greedy. Now that the bones of Jesus and his family have been found, can his birth certificate and Social Security card be far behind? The Christian obsession with relics is really a pagan exercise, as the Council of Trent readily recognized in the 16th century.
Essays
5 minute read
Sex Ed, 21st-Century style
A reader has accused the editor of the Philadelphia City Paper of the grossest hypocrisy for in effect financing his high-toned editorial content with sex ads in the rear, so to speak, of his alternative paper. An 80-year-old sexual late bloomer suggests: Consider the alternatives.
Essays
4 minute read