Barely a week goes by without some new Hollywood scandal breaking in the lascivious news media – most recently, rape allegations against X-Men director Bryan Singer and other showbiz power players. Far less often does one hear about a Hollywood name who has left scandal behind and carved out a life of stability and maturity.

By his early 20s, Rob Lowe already had a drinking problem and career-damaging sex tape under his belt, so to speak (this was before sex tapes were career-building). But rehab and marriage set him on the right track. “When I changed my life, when I sobered up, when I saw that show business couldn’t fill that place that was empty, those buried feelings rose, and having found the love of the right woman, I started a family of my own. The best chapter of my life began,” he writes in his autobiography, the double entendre-titled Love Life.

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The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish is an important, even revolutionary book. Written by Notre Dame professor Linda Przybyszewski and published by Basic Books, it tells the story of the “Dress Doctors.” The Dress Doctors were a group of artists of the early 20th century. They believed in form and beauty and created noble works that elevated the culture they lived in. They were brilliant, accomplished, and self-confident. Their work was great enough to be mentioned in the same breath as Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

They were also women who designed dresses. The Lost Art of Dress is about a group of remarkable women who created the women’s fashions that were popular during the high summer of American sartorial good taste, roughly 1920-1960. Names like Mary Brooks Picken, Mary Schenck  Woolman, Grace Margaret Morton, and Harriett and Vetta Goldstein may have been forgotten,…

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Even if Bryan Singer is innocent of rape, he and his Hollywood cohorts should still be subjected to shame and ridicule.

To the movie-viewing public, Singer is known as the director/producer of blockbuster films such as the X-Men series, Superman Returns, and Valkyrie.  To anybody who knows anything about Hollywood society, as I learned in about five minutes of Googling, Singer is known as a host of regular bacchanalias for young male aspiring actors and models.

Here’s where everybody agrees: These parties are a sexual cornucopia for Singer and other powerful Hollywood figures.  In 2009, the website Queerty published what one imagines are the most tasteful photos of a Singer party (at the infamous estate of blockbuster director/producer Roland Emmerich), along with some brief, fawning commentary.  Here’s the most unfortunate line, given the present rape lawsuit against Singer: “And sorry, no photos of the after-after party (which generally has…

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Attacking (perceived) inequality is pretty sexy these days—especially now that it has trickled down from academic tomes by French economists to pop culture. The latest edition of needlessly politicizing pop culture is New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas’s attack on Jerry Seinfeld’s online series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. According to Giridharadas, the show amounts to little more than “pairs of rich guys chatting about the gilded joys of their lives and careers and cars, about the sealed-off world they inhabit and we don’t”—echoing the Gabfest trio of Slate commentators (naturally) who whined about the “unacknowledged privilege” of these “rich old famous guys” in a show “built to repel people.”

In a just world, these sorts of attacks would be yawned away, along with the recent brouhaha over Seinfeld’s response to accusations that he was being racist in the guest selection for his show. (After…

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James Franco is smart. Want to know how I know? He (via dozens of fawning journalists) told me so. He’s a Renaissance Man. He’s an actor, director, poet and intellectual of the highest order.

Again, all of this is according to those who know him best (or get to have organic scones with him in Manhattan).

He generally fits the bill of a vaguely hungover, Lower East Side, semi-academic hipster artist living the unraveling agenda of Tuesday-morning being and nothingness.

If you can read descriptive sentences like this without feeling sick to your stomach, I recommend this recent write-up of Mr. Franco over at Esquire.com. And there are plenty more where that came from on the information super highway!

No one should begrudge James Franco for having a thirst for knowledge. In many ways, it is cool to see someone at his level of fame and stardom…

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The big news out of Hollywood is that Bryan Singer, director of The Usual Suspects, Superman Returns, and three of the X-Men films, has been accused of sexually molesting a teenager. It’s important to note that when dealing with these kinds of damaging accusations, innocent until proven guilty is still the standard for jurisprudence as well as basic human decency. The charges against him are 14 years old and the timing of the lawsuit coincides with the release of his latest X-Men blockbuster, so there’s certainly a case to be made that his accuser is being opportunistic.

However, the problem for Bryan Singer is that so many of his Hollywood peers are demonstrably depraved. Getting a fair trial in the court of public opinion is difficult at best. We all know Hollywood is full of moral degenerates; the scenario described by Singer’s accuser is believable enough. Then a teenager…

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The best television show you’re not currently watching is FX’s modern homage to the American wild west, Justified. Set in the hills of eastern Kentucky, and starring the coolest lawman since Gary Cooper – Timothy Olyphant as Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens – Justified is just the right mix of interesting writing, compelling performances and layered morality tale that keeps a loyal audience coming back for more after five seasons.

Based on characters created by the late author Elmore Leonard, Justified goes deeper with, and thinks smarter about, both its protagonists and villains. While there is plenty of action and guns-a-blazing moments to be enjoyed, what draws you into the world of Harlan, Kentucky to stay are the relationships that exist between those fighting on the side of the law, between those fighting against the law, and between those who fall on opposing sides in the timeless conflict.

Deputy…

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Human Barbie first made news in the United States a year and a half ago when shows like Good Morning America scoffed at the notion of a woman who would wear “doll-like” makeup and drink a liquid diet. (Sarcastic gasp.)

“Is that attractive, though?” asked Amy Robach, an conveniently attractive female anchor.

“No words,” was the response from her co-anchor, Josh Elliott. “To aspire to that is just disappointing.”

Note to the GMA crew: You might benefit from a little background on the “wax figure,” as Ms. Robach summed her up.

GQ recently published an interview with Human Barbie, Valeria Lukyanova: a real-life, 28-year-old woman from Odessa in the Ukraine who uses creative makeup tricks, bright blue contact lenses, and long, blonde hair extensions to achieve an image that’s close to “perfect” by Barbie standards.  In the article, GQ labels her a “racist space alien” before describing her upbringing…

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If you’re unfamiliar with “the manosphere,” it is a burgeoning internet subculture dedicated to men hashing out all things masculine. It’s a fascinating, diverse virtual world born of the damaging excesses of feminism, which have left many men sorting through the wreckage of gender relations and questioning what it means to be a man in this grave new world. Much of it – the Dalrock and Art of Manliness websites come to mind – is valuable in terms of shared advice, self-examination, healthy debate, and supportive fellowship in a culture that is often openly hostile to traditional notions of masculinity. But there is an ugly subset of the manosphere that gives the rest of it a bad name.

A prime example is the website Return of Kings, created and run by a controversial American PUA (that’s “pick-up artist” in manosphere acronyms) who goes by “Roosh V.” Considering that Roosh has…

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The problem with libertarians is that they have no respect for the natural law. The natural law is often described, particularly on the left, as the scary philosophy of the theocons, right-wing religious nuts who want to send America back to the 1950s.

But natural law can be seen as a lot more simple than that. It simply holds that human beings have a conscience, and that in every culture and across time certain things are wrong. Rape. Murder. Rooting for the New York Yankees.

But to some proponents of freedom, there is no natural law – basically, anything goes. Libertarians argue that people can be free to make their own rules and should be able to do whatever they want as long as it’s not hurting anyone else. Thus, a libertarian friend of mine recently responded to a question I posed on Facebook: is it wrong to pay someone…

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