The best part of “Playing in the FM Band,” a new documentary about revolutionary radio personality Steve Post, finds our hero trapped in the bathroom of WNYC. “In the instant before my flesh made contact with the seat, I realized that I was clutching a cold, metal object in my right hand,” Post says in…
For the Academy, there was only room for one, wigged, weird-accented performance from Sacha Baron Cohen. Naturally, it went to the one scripted by Aaron Sorkin and dripping with sanctimony. The Oscars announced the full roster of nominees Monday morning, marking nearly a year without cinemas, exempting many of the top contenders from a theatrical…
In a recent interview with Variety, Aaron Sorkin revealed how he’d script a speculative end to the Trump presidency. After the election, Sorkin predicted, in the face of a clear win for Biden, Trump will try to claim the Democrats cheated. But then a reckoning arrives. “For the first time, his Republican enablers march up…
On November 30, fans of 1960s counterculture commemorate what would have been the 80th birthday of the American Jewish activist and anarchist Abbie Hoffman, who died in 1989. Hoffman was a cofounder of the Youth International Party, whose adherents were called Yippies, alongside Jerry Rubin (1938 –1994), Nancy Kurshan (born 1944), and Paul Krassner (born…
● Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture By Josh Lambert NYU Press, 280 pages, $35 Among the Jewish traits I am most proud to be historically and culturally associated with is the way my people obstreperously defend our principles even when doing so goes against our best interests. I love the loudmouths and the…
Decades before Jon Stewart brought his popular admixture of satire and journalism to the mass media on Comedy Central, the unique hybrid of the two genres could be found regularly in only one very hip and often outrageous media outlet. But Paul Krassner, the self-described “investigative satirist” who pretty much invented the form in his…
