Note: I originally wrote this piece in June 2018 for The Daily Banter upon the publication of Seymour Hersh’s memoir, Reporter. In the wake of his unacceptable reporting about Ukraine, I am republishing it here with some slight revisions. Throughout his career, Seymour Hersh has been a crusading investigative reporter…

One of the most extraordinary sleight-of-hands a dramatist can pull is when they remind us that the antihero we’ve been following is in fact, the villain. Shakespeare was a master of this: in Macbeth, we are willing to go along with Macbeth for the first two-thirds of the play because…

So let’s talk about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In an interview, Mike Nichols once said of Edward Albee’s masterpiece that it’s the only play he knew of “in which every single thing that happens is in the present. Even the beautiful reminiscences of the past are traps being set…

Kendall Roy has had a lot of terrible ideas. He wrote and performed a rap for his dad that made “Angela Bassett did the thing” look like “Lose Yourself.” He told his kids they could feed their rabbit bagels. He threw a birthday party for himself with an entryway designed…

OK, so remember when I spent all of last week’s recap doing a “Kendall is Prince Hal” seminar? I was an idiot to do that because if “Kill List” is any indication, Kendall’s leadership skills are so deficient that if he were delivering the St. Crispin’s Day speech it would…

Last week I compared Kendall Roy to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal. When we first meet Hal in Henry IV Part I, he’s a drunken layabout who hangs out all day at the Boards Head Tavern with Sir John Falstaff, and doesn’t seem to have the stuff great leaders are made of…

Studies show that when a person dies, hearing is the last thing to go. Even as a person lies unconscious, unable to breathe, brain wave activity soon to cease, they can still hear what’s said to them. …

Last Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview between Lesley Stahl and Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was as disgraceful as people feared. Critics argued that handing a microphone to a QAnon swamp creature would normalize her, and they were right. …

Logan Roy has beaten down all the important people in his life to the point that they all believe they’re a joke. This is why Shiv, Roman, and Kendall, despite all their attempts to divorce themselves of him, cannot avoid getting caught in Logan’s machinations, because they believe that only…