Philip Martin

Jason A. Ney’s “Richard Fleischer: Journeyman” makes the case for a versatile director who spent his career in the shadow of his brilliant father and found another definition of excellence.

Let us read it for you. Listen now. Your browser does not support the audio element. EDITOR'S NOTE: Jason Arday apparently took his own life last week.

Dave Marsh, who died Friday at 76, belonged to a generation of rock critics who believed records mattered enough to fight over with the moral intensity normally reserved for wars, elections, and the designated hitter. Marsh was certain Kiss was mediocre, Journey calculated, the Grateful Dead the worst band in creation, and Queen possibly fascist. He thought John Bonham was a bad drummer and was lukewarm about "Blood on the Tracks." These were not opinions offered with the understanding that everybody hears music differently. They were verdicts, and Marsh was a hanging judge.

Four decades after ‘Less Than Zero,’ Bret Easton Ellis returns to the beautiful, numb Los Angeles teenagers who made his reputation. Ryan Murphy might be just the man to make us feel something for them.

I'm far from a Luddite. I like having the accumulated knowledge of civilization in my pocket, even if it's mostly used to check the weather, being able to conduct banking business at 2 a.m., and that Shazam can identify whatever song I'm listening to.

The old cultural signals of aging are disappearing. Maybe the trick isn’t staying young but staying curious.

Bryan Burrough strips the mythology from the men who made the West wild, while Donald ‘Skip’ Hays turns contemporary Arkansas politics into a satire almost too plausible to be fiction.

Paul Greenberg, this newspaper's late legendary editorial page editor and columnist, understood an Arkansas summer is less a season than a

Two compelling new books — one about singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, the other about an unsolved double murder in Alaska — reckon with the distance between the facts we can recover and the truth we want them to provide.

Three strikes and you're out: less a baseball rule than a cosmic inevitability, or so we pretend. The phrase long ago escaped the ballpark and now moonlights in criminal sentencing, HR meetings and the private ledgers we keep on serial disappointers.