‘Just because I could’: Would Bill Clinton survive Lewinsky scandal these days? Not likely
Counterfactual history can be little more than trivial nonsense. Take, for example, the Washington Post’s frivolous, “let’s pretend” story last week ruminating about what if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency. … Continue reading
The 15 ‘most influential’ Web sites? A third of them date to 1995
Sure, lists about the “most important this” or the “most fun that” tend to be inane. And eye-rolling in their contrivance. But Time magazine’s recent compilation of the “15 most … Continue reading
Ick alert? TV dramatizations of Clinton-Lewinsky scandal airing or in works
More than 20 years after it ended, the scandalous affair of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky still fascinates, still strangely exerts a hold on popular culture. How otherwise to explain … Continue reading
CNN series gives kitchen-sink treatment to the ’90s
Call it the kitchen-sink approach to documentary-making. That’s an effective summation of the seven-part, eight-hour CNN series, “The Nineties,” which wrapped up last night with a jumbled look at the … Continue reading
O.J. Simpson wins parole, but it’s no 1995 moment
O.J. Simpson’s parole hearing today in Nevada may have been widely watched and much-anticipated. But it was no “flashbulb moment,” not an occasion so rare and powerful that it will … Continue reading
Sitting in jail, O.J. Simpson becomes a cultural reference point
While he sits in prison in Nevada, O.J. Simpson, convicted armed robber and central figure in the 1995 “Trial of the Century,” has become an odd if recurring point of … Continue reading
Timeless lessons of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing
The attack came without warning, at a little after 9 a.m. local time, on April 19, 1995. A 7,000 pound bomb, made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil and packed … Continue reading
22 years after, ‘Newsweek’ takes red pen to flawed Internet column
It’s been 22 years since Newsweek magazine published one of the most astonishingly off-target commentaries about the Internet and the early Web. The commentary was so strikingly wrong-headed that it … Continue reading
PBS doc on OKC bombing pushes hard on vague, distant connections
To its credit, the “American Experience” documentary airing tomorrow night on PBS about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing has little patience with extravagant and bizarre conspiracy theories that have flourished … Continue reading
PBS doc on OKC bombing signals anew the significance of 1995
PBS on Tuesday is to air an “American Experience” documentary about the deadliest episode of home-grown terrorism in U.S. history, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. The program revisits a … Continue reading