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For this year’s Slate Summer Movies contest, I challenged readers to dream up a title and tagline for a future installment in the Bourne franchise using Robert Ludlum’s venerable titling formula: definite pronoun + proper name + abstract noun. ( The Holcroft Covenant , for example, or The Aquitaine Progression .)

Tags: arts, author, chunky-buttons, facebook, ludlum, robert-ludlum, science, soviet-weapons

Given the low expectations engendered by its high-concept title, Time Machine Chefs (ABC, Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET) is among the more thoughtful food shows wafting into your living room. It’s a cooking competition on the historical-re-enactment tip

Tags: article-toolbar, articles, arts, cheating-lover, children, machine-chefs, progressive news, slate-group, video, war

I recommend Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the 2003 Don DeLillo novel of the same name, in the spirit that I might recommend Scandinavian-style salted licorice. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, to put it mildly—even some Cronenberg devotees may be turned off by this movie’s icy, cerebral quality, its aggressive oddness. But at least it doesn’t taste like anything else out there

Tags: article-toolbar, arts, author, kristen-stewart, movies, predictable, science, slate, united-airlines, war

During an interview with Fortune magazine that was published today, Mitt Romney said that he would eliminate federal funding for Amtrak as one of his cuts aimed at balancing the budget: So first there are programs I would eliminate. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy , the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Tags: amtrak, arts, author, budget, economy, government, health, network

Here is a list of the musicians, artists, and other figures mentioned in this series, along with brief bios.

Tags: apple, arts, chunky-buttons, david-weigel, elections, facebook, media, mistake-choking, politics, science, technology

Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer , shot in just 18 days in the projects of the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood for which it’s named, feels by turns casual and studied, tossed-off and meticulously constructed. A self-financed in-between-projects lark for the director (his next major release, a documentary on the making of Michael Jackson’s album Bad , is due out in the fall), Red Hook Summer takes its sweet time getting going.

Tags: arts, author, bikini, clarke-peters, media, photos, science, summer-review, taekwondo, war

Satirizing Hollywood, to the extent that it’s even possible, isn’t for the faint of heart. How do you exaggerate something that’s so outsize on its own, a land of people who don’t know the meaning of shame yet live in fear of embarrassment?

Tags: ad-choices, apocalypse, article, arts, audio, books, facebook, media, olympic-long, progressive news

In a small Western town tucked between a mountain range and a pristine forest, citizens are disappearing. First it was the owner of the local gas station.

Tags: article, arts, babies, books, chunky-buttons, congress, national-crisis, never-governor, progressive news, science

For a novelist, Nicholson Baker writes a lot like an essayist. Plots and characters are banished to the outer reaches of Baker’s fiction, which, in the mold of essayists from Montaigne onward, lovingly inspects small things and from them tweezes out unexpectedly large ideas

Tags: arts, facebook, friends, media, olympics, politics, slate, vacation-women, video

The furor over the release of the British film magazine Sight & Sound ’s once-per-decade list of “The Greatest Films of All Time” (OK, “furor” in the admittedly dollhouse-scale world of professional film criticism) left me shrugging. Yes, Vertigo displaced Citizen Kane from the No.

Tags: arts, author, facebook, media, progressive news, slate, sound, sound-vertigo