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While fewer Americans are going to the movies, it is a totally different story in many other parts of the world, where cinema is booming. Non-U.S. moviegoers accounted for about 70% of global box office receipts last year (which hit $35.9 billion) compared to about 63% in 2007.

Emerging economies are responsible for most of that growth, and there is plenty of room for more, because there are significantly fewer cinema screens per capita and lower ticket prices

But the emerging world enthusiasm for Hollywood films does not extend to comedies, or at least not relative to its love of action movies and animated films.

Peele draws a straight line from his past, conducting laughs, to his present, conducting dread: “People who have done live comedy and who have written comedy develop a real sense of how an audience is going to react. It’s a skill that continues to sharpen, and in my directing career, it’s left me obsessed with riding the audience like a wave.”

“I do like to give the audience enough to figure it out, if they were to watch the movie enough, but I feel similarly to David Lynch in that I don’t think the audience needs to know everything. The key for me, as a director, is that I need to know everything, because the audience can sense it if I don’t. The beauty of Lynch’s work is that you can leave fulfilled and, at the same time, clueless as to what it was about.”

Peele wants social critiques to intertwine with his scares. “When you look at the great horror directors—George Romero, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Alfred Hitchcock—they’re all talking about something without talking about it,

"Why Study History?" The piece offers a powerful opening brief: The answer goes back to judgment, which requires more than knowing where the tools of self-government are and how to wield them. Judgment implies nothing less than wisdom–an even bigger word–about human nature and society. It takes a good sense of the tragic and of the comic to make a citizen of good judgment.

Tragedy, comedy, paradox and beauty are not the ordinary stuff of even the best courses in civic and government. But history, along with biography and literature, if they are well taught, cannot help but convey them.

The truly tough part of civic education is to prepare people for bad times.

First, its characters are a warm tribute to the three main populations targeted by the Nazis.

Second, the film focuses on the Nazis’ motivations, a poisonous cocktail of bias, greed, and disdain for law.

Third and most important, the film’s use of comedy turns out to offer a fresh way to talk about the run-up to World War II and the Communist era that followed.

in a much-needed and well-timed satire of snowflake hand-wringing over the Australian bush fires, the Sun’s politically incorrect columnist Jeremy Clarkson declared the continent unfit for human habitation and welcomed scorched whiteys back to the motherland, unaccompanied minors and all.

Clarkson’s suggestion that Australians needed to “come home”, while unconsciously prefiguring the mass migrations the climate crisis will cause in this decade, could read as a slap in the face to indigenous Australians, for whom the continent has always been “home”

Both Clarkson’s and Turd’s careers have flourished by exploiting the notion that they are lone voices of sanity against a politically correct snowflake cabal intent on silencing normal blokes like them

“I was very anti-Trump up until when he won, and then I had to realize, ‘OK, do I continue as a broken person?’ Because he legitimately was breaking people. Because once the thing that you hate wins, what do you do?”

What Mr. Gutfeld did, in part, was capitalize on a defining talent that he and the former president share: a kind of insult conservatism that can frame any serious argument as a joke and any joke as a serious argument, leaving viewers to suss out the distinction.

“There’s sort of a nihilism at the core of that,” said Nick Marx, a Colorado State University professor and co-author of “That’s Not Funny,” a book about right-leaning comedy. He suggested that Mr. Gutfeld’s shtick was the troubling culmination of Fox’s commingling of news and entertainment.

Obama on Kimmel: Trump Isn't Funny Anymore

Obama, with his uninvited guest, brought a note of the ominous to the otherwise cozy late-night couch, suggesting that the era of 2011—the time when Trump could exist simply as a punchline—is over.

And yet here we are. Trump has been anti-establishment not just when it comes to politics, but also when it comes to the broader sphere of entertainment: Comedians have been unsure, exactly, how to treat him. The president was in that sense making a political argument that was also about comedy: He was saying, essentially, that the time for simple jokes about Trump—the kind he made in 2011, the kind so many people have been making since Trump became a political candidate—has ended.

The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.

Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.

I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century

Millions tuned in every week to hear Trump say his signature line, “You’re fired,” and cement his image as a man who played up conflict for the cameras and who never met a self-promotional product placement he didn’t like. He was a quintessential reality star — and a senior Trump campaign adviser, Paul Manafort, said this past week that the mogul is still exactly that: “This is the ultimate reality show. It’s the presidency of the United States.”

Everyone may love to watch the villains and the insult-lobbing ringmasters on reality shows, but no one ever roots for them, which, technically, should not bode well for Trump’s chances. Technically.

The people who stick around longest on competition shows aren’t always the ones with the most “skill” at whatever it is the shows make contestants do. Often, they’re the ones who stir up the most hate-watch rage

social liberalism’s sweeping victory produced new forms of backlash — less traditionalist and more populist, less religious and more rowdy, not sacred but profane. These forms of resistance take aim at liberalism’s own forms of social-justice sanctimony, which have smothered academic life and permeated notionally apolitical arenas from late-night comedy to sportswriting. The resisters don’t exactly have a program. Instead, they’ve got a posture — a “whaddya got?” rebellion against any rules that the new liberal order sets.

rebels do not necessarily have all that much in common with one another, let alone with the remainders of the religious right. The Trump-voting “deplorable” is likely to be a cultural evangelical but not a churchgoer, or a pro-choice lapsed Catholic who never cared for religious moralists. The typical “manosphere” denizen is something else entirely — younger, tech-savvy, impious, impressed with his own unblinking Darwinism. As constituent parts of cultural conservatism, these groups don’t form a particularly coherent whole; what unites them are common fears (feminism, political correctness, sometimes Islam), not a common cause.

America is becoming more like Europe, where conservatism has been less than religious for some time, and the cultural right has long had a fractured and incoherent quality. (Consider France’s National Front, which draws support from Catholic traditionalists, ex-Communist workingmen and secular — and gay — voters who fear Islam’s encroachments.)

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Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".

Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,

dismissal of Arendt’s work — essentially a rejection of the “banality of evil” argument — is by no means new, but it does not hold up when one truly understands the meaning of her phrase. Couldn’t Eichmann have been a fanatical Nazi and banal?

Commenting on Eichmann’s claim that he was “neither a murderer nor a mass murderer,” Stangneth writes that his “’inner morality is not an idea of justice,  a universal moral category, or even a kind of introspection…. Eichmann was not demanding a common human law, which could also apply to him, because he, too, was human. He was actually demanding recognition for a National Socialist dogma, according to which each people (Volk) has a right to defend itself by any means necessary, the German people most of all.” Stangneth explains that for Eichmann “Conscience was simply the ‘morality of the Fatherland that dwells within’ a person, which Eichmann also termed ‘the voice of the blood.’ ”

It is this strange mixture of bravado and cruelty, of patriotic idealism and the shallowness of racialist thinking that Arendt sensed because she was so well attuned to Eichmann’s misuse of the German language and to his idiosyncratic deployment of concepts like the Categorical Imperative. As Stangneth puts it, “Hannah Arendt, whose linguistic and conceptual sensibilities had been honed on classical German literature, wrote that Eichmann’s language was a roller coaster of thoughtless horror, cynicism, whining self-pity, unintentional comedy and incredible human wretchedness.”

At 52, Stewart has the bouncy energy of a man half his age and, unlike most in the public eye, has an aversion to compliments. If I tell him I liked something about the film, he will immediately deflect the compliment and insist it was all down to Bahari, or the film’s star Gael García Bernal, or the crew

Over time, Stewart has evolved from a satirist to a broadcaster celebrated as the voice of US liberalism, the one who will give the definitive progressive take on a story.

It is a delicious irony that in the world of American TV news, one populated by raging egotists and self-aggrandisers, the person who is generally cited as the most influential is Stewart – a man so disinterested in his own celebrity, he often didn’t bother to collect his 18 Emmys, preferring to stay at home with his family.

Games are integral in human society, from ancient times to the present. Games are based on strategy and on challenge. If you do well at a game, your reward isn't "recess" or a "time out"; it's a greater challenge. When you beat a tough opponent, you seek out a tougher one. That is learning. Being able to harness the energy of games is one of our best learning tools, as any good parent knows, from patty-cake to Simon Says to musical chairs to chess or go. You can advance physical, mental, linguistic, and intellectual progress through games where the testing isn't after the fact but is intrinsic to and embedded in the very structure of play.

I recently was able to see a demonstration of a fantastic online algebra game, for example, that not only challenges learning, but where every problem is a test, in the sense that, if you don't solve the problem, the system generates a new problem that goes a little backward to some more basic principles, and then, when you succeed, it generates a more advanced problem and so forth. The results are amazing, because the test isn't at the end of the year, it is in everything you do, as you do it, getting not just harder and harder but more and more interesting. We know that boredom -- for the most gifted students and also for the lowest academic achievers -- is the biggest inhibitor of learning there is.

if the classroom experience is inferior to an online educational program, get rid of it!   If you respect and honor the fact that humans love collective experiences where we cheer, fear, laugh, or learn together -- we pay to go to sports, movies, comedy clubs, concerts, and lectures -- then you can begin to rethink school as a collective event and maximize what is added by a group experiencing together.  

The rom-com industrial complex—the cultural institution charged with capturing romance as a kind of ritual—failed to recognize the evolution of romance itself.

the rom-com's normative approach to relationships—the posture that treats romance and romantic partners as puzzles to be solved—is the thing that may be dying. Or, rather, the thing that may be evolving, slowly and steadily, into something else. We have less of a need, now, to look to the movies to give structure to our romantic relationships: The world is doing that for us, already. Under the influence of Match and eHarmony and Tinder and JDate and Our Time and OK Cupid and Farmers Only and all the others—services that promise to mate souls according to algorithms—our sense of romance itself is becoming ever more formulaic. The will-they-or-won't-they—the gooey stuff that forms the rom-com's gooey center—becomes less compelling a tension in a world ever more dominated by signals and swipes. We are ceding some of love's mystery to measurement.

the axis romance has revolved around—the guiding sense of mystery, of uncertainty, of otherness—is giving way, under the influence of digital capabilities, to more pragmatic orientations. eHarmony promises to connect people across “29 dimensions® of compatibility,” breaking those out into “Core Traits” and “Vital Attributes.” Match.com now lets MENSA members connect through its platform, and is experimenting with facial recognition programs to help users better find “their type.” The promises of big data—insights! wisdom! relevance!—are insinuating themselves onto relationships. Love, actually, is now more

SEMYONOVKA, Ukraine

Semyonovka stood accused of being a “de-communization” scofflaw.

Mr. Papchenko, the local Communist Party chief, refused to concede that anything was remotely amiss.

The debate turned from a reality show into a comedy as Mr. Trump mused that if he chose Mr. Cruz as his running mate, Democrats would sue to challenge Mr. Cruz’s eligibility — as they would, he said, if Mr. Cruz won the presidential primary.

At Republican Debate, Taunts and Quips as Rivals Battle

— Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas sharply attacked each other on Thursday night over the Canadian-born Mr. Cruz’s eligibility to be president and Mr. Trump’s “New York values,” shedding any semblance of cordiality as they dominated a Republican debate