Heat is one of the great heist movies of all time. It brings with it most of the elements of the classics: the precise preparation, the recruiting of the crew, the betrayal, the execution of the heist and of course the inevitable cruel twists of indifferent fate that define the…

NOTE: Ten days ago I wrote an obituary of Kenneth Starr for the Guardian. Originally they had asked for something quite short, but later, without my asking, extended my word limit to 1,000. I went to 1,100, trying to explain and set context…

Books discussed in this essay: Criminal: The Last Of The Innocent (2011) Criminal: Wrong Time, Wrong Place (2016) and Criminal: Bad Night (2009) Criminal: Lawless (2010) Criminal: The Sinners (2015) all by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips Once upon a time, comic book fans would point to the ways the…

I wrote this in mid-August, intending to do the last of my NFL divisional previews, of the AFC North, for my weekly American football site, Friday Morning Tight End, at Patreon, (to which you can subscribe and follow my takes on football all year round at patreon.com/mikecarlsonfmte). I had been…

I Anne Heche’s obituary for The Guardian. It went online on Monday, 15 August, and appeared in the paper the next day. I had written it on Thursday the 11th, but the paper held it until she was, finally, declared dead. As usual with these things, some of what I…

On Sunday evening I took my son to see Mount Rushmore. He is 13, born and raised in Britain, but with an American father and, as he put it, not enough of a British accent to impress the locals in South Dakota. Unexpected pride welled up in me when we…

The release tomorrow (26 April) of Don Winslow’s excellent new novel, City On Fire (by my count his 24th, including three published in Germany, but not in English) was upstaged by another announcement, that Winslow was retiring from writing. He intends to concentrate on making political videos, something he began…

This is the original version of an obituary I wrote for The Guardian newspaper in London. I first trimmed it down from this 1,030 words to something close to the tight 800 they’d asked for; they then performed a final edit to get it to fit that limited space. The…

For many people, the Super Bowl halftime show is the highlight of the evening, and this year’s extravaganza was significant beyond just its being a demonstration of vintage hip-hop and rap which both pleased the core adult audience with nostalgia, while also presenting, in effect, a safe show for those…