Plastic chairs and paper cups, laptops and cell phones: the depersonalizing symbols of air travel. Baseball hats and tee-shirts. Boarding passes spit out of machines at the beckoning of a credit card. The herding into lines by airport and airline personnel clearly bored with their jobs and annoyed b

Brokeback Mountain received one of the most enthusiastic receptions of any film released this past year. The pony had scarcely left the barn before reviewers filled its saddlebags with potential Oscars. They seemed almost afraid to corral their enthusiasm. Why should such a competent but really quit

My presence at a midday meeting a few weeks ago was not essential. Surely, other demands on my time were more pressing, but for some strange reason as the campus carillon struck noon, even though I’d be a few minutes late, for some inexplicable reason, I decided to put in an appearance. I open

Syriana provides a valuable insight, one of those “Aha!” moments. Before sitting through this new film, brilliantly written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, I held the rather conventional belief that the news from the Middle East was relentlessly depressing because of the horrible events

Long, sweeping shots from the air reveal a sullen winter landscape. Frosty roads hint at a tentative incursion of humanity into this otherwise barren countryside, but otherwise the scene could be taken from a distant planet. The camera slides over the edge of a monstrous crater, fashioned by steel a

"Nattering nabobs of negativism” was the phrase Spiro T. Agnew used to describe the press when he addressed the convention of California Republicans on Sept. 11, 1970. The vice president had his own reasons for despising what he called “the effete corps of impudent snobs.” Loc