Paul Levinson
Bio
Novels The Silk Code, The Plot To Save Socrates, It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles; LPs Twice Upon A Rhyme & Welcome Up; nonfiction The Soft Edge & Digital McLuhan, translated into 15 languages. Prof, Fordham Univ.
Stories (742)
Filter by community
Down Cemetery Road and Slow Horses
I binged Down Cemetery Road -- all eight episodes -- on Apple TV last week. It's being billed (on Screen Rant) as "the perfect replacement" for Slow Horses, now in between its fifth and six seasons, also on Apple TV. Both are adaptations of Mike Herron's novels, and both sport a spiffy amalgam of snappy dialogue and spy-on-spy lethal mischief. But Down Cemetery Road doesn't have a theme-song co-written and performed by Mick Jagger (the best theme for a spy series since "Secret Agent Man"), a lead character who flaunts his flatulence in every episode, and quite the speed of narrative of Slow Horses.
By Paul Levinson23 days ago in Criminal
Review of 'Mission Impossible: 'Dead Reckoning' and 'Final Reckoning'
May 2025 With all the promotion of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, set to debut in U.S. theaters in the next few days, I thought it was high time to see Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, released in 2023, and which is actually Part 1 of the two-part story which will conclude with The Final Reckoning.
By Paul Levinsonabout a month ago in Futurism
Review of "(Beatles) Anthology 2025"
My wife and I watched the renewed and expanded Beatles' Anthology on Disney+ the past three nights. I'd seen and heard bits and pieces of various lengths of the original eight episodes -- on YouTube, The Beatles Channel on Sirius XM, and everything in between -- which originally aired on ABC-TV in 1995, but we somehow had managed not to have seen that original on the unsmart TV in our family room. It was more than wonderful to see and hear what 2025 director Oliver Murray did with the 1995 eight episodes -- uncovering/discovering new footage as well as calling upon Peter Jackson and his elves to bring to current vibrant life what was done in 1995 (just as Jackson had done so miraculously with The Beatles: Get Back in 2021) -- but the real treat for me (treat is too weak a word) was seeing the new ninth episode.
By Paul Levinsonabout a month ago in Beat
Review of 'Frankenstein' 2025. Top Story - November 2025.
I just watched Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 two-and-a-half hour take on Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein on Netflix. This year has been a great one for movies, and del Toro’s Frankenstein continues that trend.
By Paul Levinson2 months ago in Horror
A Political Hypothesis about Why Dexter Original Sin Was Unrenewed
I've been a devoted fan of Dexter since it debuted on Showtime in 2006. My very first review of a TV show in my Infinite Regress blog in December 2006 was a rave review of the first season of Dexter 20 years ago on Showtime. The review is entitled First Place to Dexter.
By Paul Levinson2 months ago in The Swamp
Review of 'A House of Dynamite'. Top Story - October 2025.
I grew up in a world in which Dr. Strangelove was a plausible movie, a world in which we lived with the Soviet Union, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, as were we, and our best chance that we wouldn't blow up the Earth, if not to smithereens, to an uninhabitable planet, was MAD -- the mutually assured destruction that a nuclear war would engender, which would stop we human beings from ever starting such a no-win war.
By Paul Levinson2 months ago in The Swamp
Review of 'One Battle After Another'
My son (Simon Vozick-Levinson, Deputy Music Editor at Rolling Stone) invited me to see One Battle After Another with him (he wanted to see it a second time), and I'm sure glad that I just did. Paul Thomas Anderson's movie (based on Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, which I haven't read) opened in New York City and around the country last month, on September 25. It tells the story of resistance to a fascist United States of America, a story which is becoming ever more like the reality of ICE and government agents pepper-spraying clergy, pulling innocent American citizens off the street for deportation without a hearing, that we see every day on television and social media.
By Paul Levinson3 months ago in Geeks
The Relevance of McLuhan to Our Current World
On September 30, 2025 I took part in a McLuhan Salon organized by Paolo Granata in Toronto. The Salon was devoted to a consideration of some of the many issues Tom Cooper explored in his book Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, published by Connected Editions on May 1, 2025. The following is a slightly edited transcript of my responses to each of the three sections of Tom Cooper's presentation, in addition to my responses to two subsequent questions raised by members of the audience. The audience in Toronto was present in-person with Paolo Granata at the event. Tom Cooper and I attended via Zoom.
By Paul Levinson3 months ago in Humans
The Firing of Jimmy Kimmel
The firing of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC -- which is exactly what his "suspension" is -- is the latest step in the road to fascism being paved by the current President of the United States and his allies. It began with the hounding out of their jobs of FBI and other people who lawfully investigated Trump's instigation of the January 2021 attack on the Capitol, the pressure on universities to end DEI and other policies distasteful to MAGA Americans and their theorists, and of course the firing of another late-night host, Stephen Colbert, by another cowardly media operation, CBS. (William Paley must still be turning over in his grave.)
By Paul Levinson4 months ago in The Swamp
In the Dybbuk’s Pocket. Top Story - August 2025.
I first met Uncle Henry at my aunt's seder, I guess, well, back in the late 1980s. He wasn't really an uncle -- at least, not mine -- but he looked like an uncle, and I was a kid, and that's what my aunt and my parents and everyone else called him.
By Paul Levinson5 months ago in Fiction
