56 Quotes by Frank Rich

I also knew that I was on my way to becoming the worst athlete in the history of American boyhood.

The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.

In Shubert Alley that night, I had unwittingly reached the threshold of an entire landscape of alleys that would lead to a world of theaters, each a house packed with strangers both generous and mean, shabby and grand. It was to be a life full of the transitory moments, double-edged with ecstasy and loss, that I had already come to think of as the theater.

One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans' reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news.

It is kind of tedious after a while, to parse politicians doing the same thing over and over again. The facts change from week to week, but the sort of masquerade doesn't.

No one is better placed or more philosophically suited than Obama to construct the new counter narrative as we go forward in our new New Deal. But many masters of the old universe, including quite possibly his chief economic adviser, can't recognize that the world has changed or should change.

'Up in the Air' may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, 'The Grapes of Wrath,' did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression.

One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.

History is cyclical, and it would be foolhardy to assume that the culture wars will never return.