Jeremy McCarter

Tennessee Williams is aging beautifully, now that he's gone. When he died in 1983, his career had all but ground to a halt. More than two decades had passed since his last Broadway success.

'The Tempest' marks Julie Taymor's latest effort to pour old wine into stylish new bottles. Shakespeare's comedy has been filmed before, but never with quite the spin she gives it here.

Allan Metcalf's new book claims that the word "OK" is America's greatest invention. This offers a pair of provocations. How can "OK" be an invention? On a certain day, a certain guy just dreamed up the expression that has become the most frequently spoken word on the planet? And even if it is an invention, can one little word really be greater than jazz, baseball, and the telephone? Is it better than The Simpsons?

The dark heart of 'The Social Network' isn't just Mark Zuckerberg. How the Facebook movie lays bare the hollowness haunting us all.

Sarah Bernhardt was part Gaga, part Streep, even part Palin—100 years before any of them.

Movie reviewers are fading away. And then there's Stanley Kauffmann.

When I play reverse time travel and imagine historical figures turning up today (what would Ben Franklin say about the iPad? Or Jane Austen about Jersey Shore?, etc.), James Baldwin's name comes to mind. The essayist and novelist spent four decades picking at the scab of American race relations.

After Kline's more than three decades on stage and screen, it's no surprise when he turns in a fine performance. He glides from heavy drama ("The Ice Storm") to really heavy drama ("Sophie's Choice") to silly comedy ("The Pirates of Penzance") to really silly comedy ("A Fish Called Wanda"), to say nothing of all that he's done onstage. Through all these roles, a distinctive Kline-esque style has emerged.

Lucy Walker has made a horror film about the slaughter and wreckage of a nuclear attack. "Countdown to Zero" has all the essential flourishes of the genre: explosions, screaming crowds, buildings falling to ash. That the film is a documentary—an awfully persuasive one, at that—makes it all the creepier.

Every summer, the question grows more pertinent: what's so special about special effects? The more potent that Hollywood's CGI tools get, the less exciting and surprising they seem.

"This is not theater," declared President Obama on the Today show last week. He was defending his response to the BP oil spill, which he insisted was designed to get actual results, not to put on a show.

From the no-nonsense tone to the rolled-up sleeves, Obama looked and sounded the part of the engaged chief executive, so the pundits who all but ordered him to the gulf should be satisfied. But his implied threat of punitive action is beginning to have a familiar ring—too familiar.

Seventy years after it sweated and struggled to funnel troops to the front line, New York City has become the front line. Lower Manhattan still bears the scars of the 9/11 attacks, and if the Times Square bomber hadn't been so feckless, midtown would have its own crater and makeshift shrine.

If I were to count up the things I love best about America, this tableau would be high on the list: Walt Whitman, on a street in Washington, exchanging a respectful bow with Abraham Lincoln as the president's carriage rolled by.

The acclaimed Green Day album comes to the stage, and drags rock and roll along with it.

Sure, the Greeks are broke. But look how much we owe them.

What the Austin suicide attacker might have meant in his suicide note when he cited American greed.

The NEA has spent years quietly nursing its culture-war wounds. Then Rocco Landesman took over.

Today's Oscar contenders should be thankful Gene Hackman's no longer acting.

Film opens Nov. 25: It must have seemed that black had turned white and upside had turned down when Orson Welles, a man used to being praised as the youngest this and most brilliant that, began to hear himself mocked as "an international joke" and "the youngest living has-been." When Walter Kerr made that savage assessment in 1951, Welles was only 36.

Papp made theater free, and proved it was priceless.

Politicians won't get us back into the space race, but novelists just might.

Shakespeare had the good fortune to write Hamletbefore anyone could tell him how to fix it. Were he working today, the playwriting system—in this country, at least—would exhaust itself trying to improve the thing.

When Thornton Wilder wore his glasses, which was much of the time, he had a mild, professorial air—like an owl, some said. Catch him without spectacles, though, and the change was extreme.

To conservative Cassandra Henry Fairlie, Republicans sowed their present-day destruction from the start.

The playwright at the heart of America's cultural moment.

'Wind in the Willows' hardly needs annotating, but two new versions provide some added poignancy.

Even a day later, Wynton Marsalis couldn't explain why he was crying so hard during the speech he gave last Monday night at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. "Man, I don't know," he told me. "I'm not really a person that's effusive.

Darwin revolutionized our understanding of mankind's origins. Now scientists think they can apply his theories to the source of our creativity without it sounding like a lot of monkey business.

Two New York musicals come home to Broadway. Great timing: the Big Apple needs some juice.