“In the Middle East,” the Israeli general and politician Ehud Barak once said, “a pessimist is simply an optimist with experience.” Barak would know. He was Israel’s prime minister in 2000, a year that forever altered both Israel and the region. Indeed, much of the current divide between Israel and the rest of the West […]

History will be against President Donald Trump when he tries to hold on to his control of Congress after this year’s midterm elections. From pressuring state Republicans to redraw their congressional districts to create more GOP-leaning seats in the House to underscoring his policy and political wins on the campaign trail and in prime-time TV […]

For the overwhelming majority of people whose families, jobs, and personal pursuits loom larger than the endless mergers and acquisitions in Hollywood, the hue and cry over Netflix’s plans to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery is likely to elicit not much more than a shrug. To most ordinary, well-adjusted people, the ownership of a movie studio […]

Stranger Things was never meant to end like this, largely because it was never meant to go on the way it has. The first season was conceived and written as a limited series, with the possibility of succeeding other, entirely different seasons, similar to True Detective or American Horror Story. Someone at Netflix decided during filming that […]