Craig Calcaterra

Photo by Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia Steven Spielberg has a problem with the movie “Roma.” Maybe not artistically — I’m guessing that he, like most people, liked it — but with who produced it and distributed it and how. And after learning about his objections to it, I’m choking on the irony of it all.  […]

I just read the statement from Micheal Cohen prefacing his testimony before Congress. Cohen is simultaneously believable about which he speaks yet is still delusional about his role and his own character. What he said is simultaneously revealing by virtue of the fact that someone is actually, finally, giving voice to those words in an official […]

Over three years ago I wrote an essay about how environmental calamities that have hit the places where I grew up — Flint, Michigan, Parkersburg, West Virginia and Southern West Virginia — were not mere accidents. They occurred because those with wealth and power consider the lives of poor people in poor places like that […]

“Green New Deal backers say they want more high-speed trains to make airline travel less necessary, and more electric cars and charging stations. But experts warn that changing the existing fleet of cars in the U.S. would be an extraordinary effort.” — NPR tweet, February 9, 2019 “Colonists say they want to throw off the […]

I’m an unpopular figure among a certain swath of media professionals. Newspaper folks, mostly, or people who started their careers working for newspapers. They don’t like me because I’ve spent a good chunk of the past decade arguing that it’s bad when old establishment media folks coast on their reputation, credentials and presumed authority and […]

A couple of years ago I wrote about my seven favorite movies in this space. Number one on that list was “The Conversation.” It’s still number one. I’m having a hard time imagining it will ever not be number one. It’s not a movie that, when you finish it, you say “ah, that was fun.” […]

A couple of Twitter friends recently told​ me about how, as a fun exercise, they identified the number one song on the Billboard charts on their birthday for every year they were alive. It sounded like a fun idea.  And it was a fun idea until I remembered that I’m older than them it takes […]

​Over at NBC Sports I wrote about the massive disconnect that exists between the stuff that wins baseball games and the stuff that makes baseball teams money. At present, the business arrangements of the league mean that teams can stink on ice yet still rake in cash while winning doesn’t do that much for the […]

In September I wrote about Kenan Memorial Stadium at UNC Chapel Hill and its namesake, William Rand Kenan Sr., who murdered scores of blacks in the 1898 Wilmington Massacre.  This week I hosted NPR’s sports show, “Only a Game,” and produced a story about it.

The results of yesterday’s midterm election defy hot takes and easy narratives. On one level — in terms of just how overwhelmingly voters, in raw numbers, voted Democratic and/or anti-Republican — it was a Democratic wave of historic proportions. The sort of wave which puts to lie the common Republican and media talking point that […]