Hero
Story Stream
The Hero and other Cultural Characters January 24, 2025
One of my most enduring memories from my ten years traveling the US was being in a dive bar somewhere in Ohio when a woman got all upset that her man had went into the bathroom, locked it, and that was half hour ago and he wasn't answering and he had...
'Flight Risk' Is Not the Right Kind of Dumb January 24, 2025
Mark Wahlberg is calling his character in Flight Risk the first bad guy he’s played since Fear, that memorable 1996 cult classic in which he fingerbanged a babyfaced Reese Witherspoon on a rollercoaster before stalking and menacing her family. While ...
The Inimitable Weirdness of David Lynch January 22, 2025
The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s 2022, barely coded biopic of his own artistic adolescence, ends with a young Sammy Fabelman (the Spielberg stand-in) granted an audience with his hero, the legendary American director John Ford. Sitting in a dim offi...
David Lynch’s Errand Into the Wilderness January 20, 2025
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic 1835 story “Young Goodman Brown,” set in the New England of two centuries prior, tells the story of a young Puritan’s loss of faith not only in God but in his wife and his community. Wandering out into the woods one nigh...
Yukio Mishima’s Lifelong Death Wish January 14, 2025
In April 1951, General Douglas MacArthur went to the US Congress to deliver some good news. Japan, he said, had “undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history”. From the “ashes left in war’s wake” had risen a nation “dedicated to the ...
How Bob Dylan Fought the Proto-Woke January 14, 2025
The American birthright entails both the freedom and often times the necessity of making yourself up from scratch. Many of America’s most famous heroes were self-made men, from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. The same is true...
Who Should We Emulate? January 13, 2025
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” This aphorism appears in Meditations, a collection of philosophical musings written by Marcus Aurelius, a 2nd century Roman emperor.Aurelius is considered one of the less tyrannical, ev...
The Rise and Rise of Jannik Sinner January 09, 2025
The story of how Jannik Sinner, a generational talent, vaulted from being a virtually unknown teen tennis prodigy to a global superstar goes like this: In 2018, at the age of sixteen, the Italian went pro. A year later, while still ranked a lowly 546...
A Prophet of Modern Politics January 03, 2025
Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) is the most notable among his early political pamphlets, and perhaps his most famous overall alongside the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). While the Reflections ha...
What Happened to the Prime Time Buffaloes? January 02, 2025
After all the talk about finishing the season strong, Colorado’s gridiron heroes looked like they didn’t want to be anywhere near the Alamo Bowl on Saturday night. And based on the lethargic pregame trot of their mascot, Ralphie the Buffalo, neither ...
