Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (Sony Pictures).Fight Club: A Cult Movie at 20
Brad Pitt and Ed Norton in Fight Club, 1999 (alamy.com)The Engaging Mind of Umberto Eco
“Revenge in Modern Times Shall Not Be Justified”
Charles Bronson in Death Wish, 1974.A Pretty Shallow Deep Throat
A scene from 'Mark Felt'From the cover of Vanity Fair’s July 2005 issue blared this headline: “I’m the Guy They Called Deep Throat.”
The Achievement of Gertrude Himmelfarb
Homo Sapiens: An Easy Mark
Maria Konnikova’s new book arrives just as the idea of “the confidence man” is back in the news. “Con man” and “con artist” are terms that have been bestowed by Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio on their party’s nominee for the presidency. But Konnikova, in The Confidence Game, is not interested in politics per se. Instead, in certain respects, she seeks to follow in the path of David Maurer, citing his research several times in her widely publicized work. Back in 1940, Maurer, a linguistics professor, published a close and candid study of a certain, and certainly fascinating, aspect of criminal…
The Nature of Machismo
Styles make fights, boxing analysts say. So it’s not surprising that more than three decades later, Roberto Durán’s first two fights against Sugar Ray Leonard, in 1980, still make for such compelling viewing. These fighters were opposites in so many ways. Durán was known for a style that stressed skilled infighting and hard, relentless punching. He scored 69 victories, 55 by knockout, in his first 70 fights. He was famous as the fearsome man with las manos de piedra—“hands of stone.”
Jane Austen’s Memorable Con Woman
Whit Stillman made his name in 1990 with Metropolitan, an Oscar-nominated low-budget charmer that remains fresh and enjoyable today. Stillman wrote and directed the film, which focused on a group of mostly well-heeled college freshmen who spend Christmas break frequenting elegant parties and late night bull sessions in what one character calls the “urban haute bourgeoisie” haunts of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
When Words Are Weapons
Back in the 1950s, when Mario Vargas Llosa was a university student in Peru, the standards for great literature were clear. Cervantes, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and such key 20th century novelists as James Joyce and Thomas Mann, observes Vargas Llosa in Notes on the Death of Culture, “wrote books that looked to defeat death, outlive their authors and continue attracting and fascinating readers in the future.” Novels like Ulysses and The Magic Mountain, produced through “indefatigable efforts,” required of their readers “an intellectual concentration almost as great as that of their writers.” In fact culture itself, notes Vargas Llosa in this relatively…
