As is well-known, James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933) is the origin of Shangri-La, the fictional utopia nestled high in the remote mount...

According to James R. Kincaid , when discussing the issue of laughter, “some degree of oversimplification is inevitable.” At the core of the...

With Thanksgiving approaching, I inevitably thought of Arlo Guthrie’s classic song, “Alice’s Restaurant” (“it all started two Thanksgivings ...

Legend has it that Jerry Lee Lewis, the rock ‘n’ roll generation’s first “wild man,” was troubled by the sinful nature of his songs, particu...

In the chapter of Tristes Tropiques entitled “A Little Glass of Rum,” Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that anthropology is born of remorse. In...

Flowers smack of sentimentality. They’ve become a cultural symbol upon which an entire economy thrives—the flower shop. “Say it with flowers...

Among the vast repertoire of symbols available to the lyricists of popular music, one of the most frequently used is blindness. A famous use...

The last – it speaks of fatality and finality, the end of one historic moment and the beginning of another, but without the reassuring com...

An interrogation—a lengthy and methodical series of questions used by the police and the military to acquire crucial information—typically o...

The nightmarish scenario of Philip K. Dick’s short story, “A Little Something For Us Tempunauts” (1975), depicts time travelers (“tempunauts...

July 20, 1969: As Bogey says in Casablanca , “That was so long ago I don’t remember.” Actually, I do remember where I was, at least, when N...

Last time I wrote about the movies Diner (1982) and High Fidelity (2000), both of which suggest the way that the homosocial behavior of th...

The role of the teacher can be best understood as someone who provides the student with two kinds of knowledge. Following Gilbert Ryle , the...

I came across the following article, Music of a Generation: 19 Songs That Transformed America , at Americanprofile.com , the on-line version...