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Philip MartinArkansas Online |
Recently a launch monitor informed me, politely but conclusively, that I am no longer the golfer I used to be.
Sixty years after Brian Wilson turned studio pop inward, outward and upside down, The Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ remains less a nostalgic artifact...
Andy Beta’s ‘Cosmic Music’ argues that the pianist, harpist and spiritual visionary was never merely adjacent to jazz greatness. The culture...
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Netflix’s anthology reinvention ‘Beef’ trades the first season’s operatic chaos for something sharper and more unsettling.
The worthwhile music bio-pics understand that musicians are often not reliable narrators of their own lives. Neither are managers, estates, fans,...
Our dogs are better known than we are.
Douglas Stuart’s “John of John” explores inheritance, repression and the burdens fathers pass to sons, while Alice Hoffman’s “The Best Dog...
We thought about driving to Mississippi last week to meet my 89-year-old mother and her posse--Aunt Lois and Uncle Ken, and Paula and Gerald, who...
While conventional wisdom might have Ringo as underrated rock drummer and a decent bloke, he was also perhaps the wisest and most grounded member of...
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Season two of ‘Criminal Record’ turns the crime procedural inside out, asking not what happened but who gets to decide what counts.
He wrote great country songs and lived the mythology. He also made records that many listeners still find indefensible. Any honest obituary has to...
I have lately appointed myself the god of small things, our household's chief piddler. It's not an especially demanding portfolio--mostly I run...
Two recently published books circle the same question from opposite directions: How do you recognize where you stand? In "Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt...
The unseen shooter never got past the first ring of security. Shots were fired two stories up. The sound carried just enough to trigger a reaction....
In Antoine Fuqua's movie "Michael," everything is polished and pressed, the beats familiar, the arc pre-approved. Childhood: rough. Talent: obvious....
New biography of Alan R. Moritz traces how forensic science learned to define what it can — and cannot — know.
Call it the Clash of 1976 — not a roster but a diagnosis. A culture realizing it has more than one argument on its hands and refusing to settle it.
Rob Moritz, a former reporter who covered Arkansas politics for Stephens Media and now teaches journalism at the University of Central Arkansas, came...
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As studios drift from discs, boutique labels step in — Criterion restores ‘Stray Dog’ to full voice while Arrow reclaims ‘Blue Thunder’ and...
“The Battle of Algiers,” released in 1966, isn’t about terrorism, colonialism or insurgency in the tidy way a term paper is about its topic....
I went through a box of books I hadn't opened since we moved six years ago, intending to send a stack to the neighborhood Little Free Library or to...
There's a literary move that can be mistaken for caution. A novelist returns to a familiar character and a book with a modest afterlife becomes a book...
There it is again, lighting up the phone like a digital saint's card: Donald Trump, in full messiah drag, haloed and ready for worship. Not exactly a...
In a state where beer once meant whatever came off the truck, a looser, more local culture has taken hold — one that resists settling on a single...
The Library of America gathers “Legs,” “Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game” and “Ironweed” into “The Albany Trilogy,” but William...
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Early in Apple TV’s “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” Margo — played by Elle Fanning — does something that should, in the grammar of...
What happens when artists, at different points in their careers, decide to strip away a layer or two of insulation and see what's left standing?
We don't need physics to recognize the relative nature of time; just look at the ways we mark it.
At the start of Ben Lerner's startling new novel "Transcription," a man sits on a train trying to read and failing because he is facing the wrong...
A young man ain't nothing in the world these days.
Jayne Ann Phillips looks back without imposing a moral; Maria Semple keeps things moving before one can form. A memoir and a comic novel meet in their...
Only in retrospect does Gillian Welch's 1996 album "Revival" feel like a beginning.
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Movies cover all the genres, but how many sequels and reboots do we really need?
On April 14, 1865, a man slipped into a theater, waited for a laugh line, and changed the shape of American memory.
I was 7 years old when Richard Speck made me aware the world could turn intimate spaces--rooms, beds, the ordinary geometry of safety--into killing...
My late father-in-law, Yanko, was not mobbed up, although he knew people and how the world worked, which in certain regions of the country is a...
Benjamin Saltzman’s ‘Turning Away’ suggests that averting the gaze is not evasion but a form of recognition — one that complicates what we...
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A skeleton in the Texas desert reopens a buried history in ‘Lone Star’ — and exposes the stories a town tells to live with itself.
If there is a throughline for the following reviews, it isn't genre or even era so much as adjustment under pressure -- artists recalibrating what...
I don't have much trouble doing my taxes. Not because they're simple; they aren't. I've always just seen them as basic adult skills, like tying a tie...
How much clarity is useful if it doesn't lead anywhere? In his comic novel "Down Time," Andrew Martin writes about people who can describe their lives...
Recent "No Kings" rallies have the virtue of clarity. The slogan told you what was being rejected. It said less about how to understand the thing...
Each generation gets the crime writer it deserves. Picture the handoff: The 1920s swapped monocles for brass knuckles, as Dashiell Hammett yanked the...
A new Blu-ray release brings “Randy and the Mob” and the Oscar-winning short “The Accountant” back into circulation, both newly restored, both...