Philip Martin
Columnist
Latest Stories
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POPNOTES | OPINION: Wristwatches in film tell us something about the character being played
Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" movies are set about 18,000 years into the future -- that's what my friend who's really into the Frank Hebert universe tells me. (Tho…
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OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: The painstaking historian
Behavior is not hard-wired, not a genetic program that runs independent of our will. It is a process, an ongoing dialogue between our environment and that part…
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Nature
In his 2008 book "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell writes that "10,000 hours [of practice] is the magic number of greatness." He argues that if you spend 10,000 hou…
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CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: The ‘best’ of the films that ennoble and edify as well as entertain us
Three artists arrive in Los Angeles: a famous poet, a renowned painter of murals and an Academy Award-winning director. Each of them finds themselves stirred b…
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POPNOTES | OPINION: HBO’s ‘The Regime’ takes chances — and risks failure
While "The Regime" might not feel as naturalistic as Iannucci's political satires. There is a hint of Wes Anderson in the wistful symmetry of its set design, b…
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OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: WhatsApp, doc?
I live in an affluent neighborhood bordered by a poor neighborhood that's not far from where any number of unhoused people sleep rough. You might imagine what …
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Desperate to be seen
There's a truck I sometimes see in the neighborhood, late model, white, nondescript but for its bumper stickers which identify the driver as a man of strong, r…
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ON BOOKS | OPINION: ‘Wandering Stars’ a difficult sequel to Orange’s first novel
Tommy Orange's "Wandering Stars" brings back characters from his first book and reaches back to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864.