Harvey Blume

Fuse News Film Review: “The Gatekeepers” — Full of a Sense of History

April 13, 2013
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Israel has genuine enemies without, to be sure. But “The Gatekeepers” leaves the impression that it has no less mortal an enemy within.

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Short Fuse: Meditating on the Psychedelic Realism of “Mad Men”

April 6, 2013
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But there’s something else going on in “Mad Men,” all the more because it’s latent, unannounced, episode by episode. It’s this thing about art and advertising, and the difference, circa that era, if any.

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Fuse News: “The Boston Phoenix” Goes Down Ugly

April 1, 2013
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The once proudly and authentically counter-cultural paper The Boston Phoenix went out ugly, fawning on mobster Whitey Bulger.

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Short Fuse: The Art of Charles Krafft — Nazism in Modern Drag?

March 25, 2013
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It’s not a simple story. It’s a story about dreadful ideas, hideous politics and their interaction with art and aesthetic judgment.

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Short Fuse: Talking the “Mind and Cosmos” Blues

March 1, 2013
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Thomas Nagel: Has he penned a rallying cry for those who have no taste for much science in the first place?

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Short Fuse Interview: Susan Jacoby, Robert Ingersoll, and Keeping the Secular Tradition of American History Alive

February 8, 2013
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Robert Ingersoll is all but unknown in our time. Susan Jacoby sets out to answer why. One answer she proposes is that it was generally assumed that the reactionary expressions of religion Ingersoll contended against would simply fade away over time, to be replaced by education, broader culture and scientific reason.

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Short Fuse: Quotes for the New Year

December 31, 2012
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Obsession is the thing in us that makes us not everybody else. — Joss Whedon

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Short Fuse: “Django Unchained” — History Dumbed Down

December 28, 2012
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There is so much of a certain kind of violence here — the kind you’ve seen in Tarantino movies before — that it in a sense takes the violence out of violence.

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Short Fuse Review: Killing George Higgins Softly

December 22, 2012
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“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” was simply too good a movie, perfect, in its way, and the director of “Killing Them Softly” wants to avoid comparison.

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Short Fuse: “Jewish Jocks” — Many Avenues Into Jewish History

December 13, 2012
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But sometimes, though it may defy certain sorts of expectations, Jews excel not because they have higher sports IQs but just because they are better.

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