Hal Crowther

There’s always a scene in the grittiest vampire movies where the old bloodsucker is sleeping peacefully in his coffin, looking as innocent as the undead can look, and the handsome hero plants a pointed stake in the vampire’s sternum and takes a big swing at it with his mallet. Whether or not the blow turns […]

I’ve successfully immunized myself to the horse-race fever of presidential elections: the relentless polls and fundraising totals, the endorsements and lame speeches and could-be-fatal gaffes, worst of all the dim psychoanalysis and fanzine micro-dissection of candidates who always looked much alike to me. I was inoculated against most of this when I was fairly young, […]

For all of us who still read newspapers, May 9 was a morning for banner headlines in North Carolina. The good news was that Raleigh’s own Josh Hamiltonthe tattooed, star-crossed, substance-tormented Texas Rangers superstarhad hit four home runs in a night game against Baltimore. Hamilton is the fourth player to hit four in a game […]

KEY WESTIn Hispanic South Florida, the Republican candidates for president were regaling audiences of Castrophobic exiles with their promises, if elected, to all but rain nuclear warheads on Havana. In one exchange of spectacular idiocy, whoring for both Cuban exiles and evangelicals, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich speculated about whether Castro’s soul would go to […]

Every time a citizen with good intentions provokes a police-state reaction from the local authorities, the angels smile and society moves one millimeter closer to salvation. It doesn’t take much to provoke them. Just down the road in liberal, affable Chapel Hill, where I lived for many years without experiencing police brutality or much civil […]

I don’t think of Rupert Murdoch as a particular obsession of mine. He casts such a long, cold shadow over the world of communications that no one who ever labored there can fail to be acutely aware of him. Many loathe him, many fear himmany envy him, of course. Some few may love him. And […]

The Republican Party’s slapstick search for a leader would be heartwarming and sidesplitting but for the tragic knowledge that one of these scrambling midgets will collect tens of millions of votes in the presidential election of 2012. Never have so many amounted to so little, talked so much rubbish, dreamed of an office so far […]

The greatest mistake any observer can make in these sad times is to declare that popular culture can sink no further, that the worst and lowest have been achieved and nothing more vile or mortifying could possibly lie beneath. I wrote an essay on the death of American culture, published in 1993 in the Independent […]

Moses had higher hopes and a bigger entourage, and a lot more riding on his success. But his departure from Egypt wasn’t accomplished with any more urgency or drama than mine. It was a few days before the revolution, before the protesting multitudes began to fill Tahrir Square. Though the political temperature was rising rapidlythe […]

The people have spoken. But what did they say? I wish that President Obama, besieged by conservatives warning him to heed the voice of the people, could summon the impudence to say what I might say, in his place, about the midterm elections of 2010. Maybe this is the way he’d answer his tormentors, if […]