Culture Television
Darren Franich
Kara Thrace likes to drink too much and screw too often. She’s great at her job and hates her job. Her pop ditched her and her mom beat her. She hurts people who love her and pisses off everybody else. For one brief shining moment she found true love, then ditched the guy in the morning for a quickie marriage with a man she regularly cuckolds. She is without a doubt the most passionate, insane, terribly real person on TV, even if she lives on a spaceship, worships Athena, and can’t go two minutes without saying the expletive “frak” or one of its derivatives.
Culture
Darren Franich
“Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man—and I’m in all of them.”
—Joseph Cotten
Politics
Darren Franich
In a world in which the president was talking about defending the institution of marriage from activist judges—which is kind of like defending the institution of spelunking from firefly ninjas; or defending the institution of friendship from Hitler—this was like the voice of a loving relative talking you out of a coma nightmare, reminding you that there was a real world where Republicans stood for things and Democrats stood for things and they could argue about those things until the end of time, but that all of those things had a basic ring of truth. McCain wasn’t the Republican who Democrats could love; he was the Politician who Sane People could love, cutting through the endless bounds of bullshit and trying to just, well, talk to people. That was straight talk, and no bullshit. Now, he’s all bullshit, all the time.
Culture
Darren Franich
Sunshine makes a decent go of it for awhile. A multiracial crew of astronauts gets sent to reignite the sun—a fun twist, since most science fiction is about moving further out into the final frontier. There’s a nice lowkey chemistry onboard—the actors are playing professionals on a suicide mission, so there’s a minimum of interpersonal drama. Nothing you wouldn’t find in an office or The Office. The everpresent sun lurks in the distance.
Politics
Kevin Hilke
We’ve stopped talking about “global warming” and begun talking about “climate change” simply because the latter is a more precise description of what’s actually happening. The shift has happened not in spite of science but in the name of better science, and it implies no concomitant shift in scientific opinion about the gradual, manmade warming of the planet. The Washington Times is one of the few right-wing organs that hasn’t yet climbed out of its psychosis on this issue.
