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)
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Choices, Nearly Impossible, about Ukraine
Last night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow asked the crucial question: is there any country willing to jump in and stand with the Ukrainians against the Russian aggression? General Barry McCaffrey (Ret), explained that anything the US and NATO did to directly confront and fight with the Russians could provoke Putin, already clearly unhinged, to bring nuclear weapons into an expanding worldwide fight.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in The Swamp
Review of 'Suspicion' 1.5
Superb, delightful episode 1.5 of Suspicion up on Apple TV+. Yes, delightful. [Spoilers follow ... ] My favorite scene was Tara and Sean in undies at the door, pretending to be a couple when the pesky neighbor came calling with a shotgun or a rifle. Perfectly staged and acted. Tara actually enjoying it underneath the pretence. Sean almost reminiscent of James Bond.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Criminal
Review of 'Severance' 1.3
It's hard to watch and review a profoundly dystopian science fiction series when a profoundly dystopian reality -- the horrendous, Nazi-like invasion of Ukraine by Russia -- is going on and available to see on a myriad of television screens. I'll be interviewing the Polish holocaust poet Grzegorz Kwiatowski about this on Monday (I'll be posting links to the video and audio recordings to that interview here), but for now, I wanted to take an hour to keep up with and review episode 1.3 of Severance on Apple TV+.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'Raised by Wolves' 2.4
A really superb and pivotal Raised by Wolves 2.4, in which every kind of sentience is pitted against one another. Since most of the sentience is one kind or another of artificial intelligence, usually embodied in some kind of android, the contests and their outcomes provide one of the best explorations of the power and limitations of programmed android intelligence in any television series. Isaac Asimov would have loved this. I wonder if he would have agreed that this was a far better example of such exploration of android intelligence than we've at least seen so far in the Foundation series on Apple TV+.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'Suspicion' 1.4
First, let me say that I'm really liking Suspicion on Apple TV+. It has great ambience, including the music, fine acting (including now Tom Rhys Harries as Eddie Walker), and a plot that keeps slapping you in the face with unexpected developments, often lethal. Episode 1.4 was the best so far, excelling in all of those pulsing qualities.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Criminal
Review of 'Severance' 1.1-1.2
Finally saw the first two episodes of Severance. Well it's only been up on Apple TV+ for less than a week, and I'd intended to watch the two episodes earlier, but got caught up in other things, and I wanted to give those two episodes my full attention. Hey, I almost sound like one of those perpetually apologetic workers (John Turturro's Irving in particular) in that quasi-totalitarian workplace, in which workers or "innies" have no knowledge of their lives outside of work, and vice versa, hence the title of the series, Severance.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'Inventing Anna'
The wife and I binged Inventing Anna the past few nights, the nine-episode Shonda Rhimes series detailing the real-life rise and fall of Anna Delvey aka Anna Sorokin. It's superb television, for a bunch a reasons. Julia Garner in the title role was perfect, peerless, and Emmy-worthy. Pretty much the same for Anna Chlumsky who plays Vivian Kent, the fictitious name for the real reporter Jessica Pressler whose New York magazine story "How Anna Delvey Tricked New York's Party People" is the basis of the Netflix series. I haven't read the story, but the story in the movie is an incredible, powerful tale of a con artist, Anna, so charismatic that her lawyer and Vivian in their own ways practically fell in some kind of love with her.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Criminal
Slipping Time. Top Story - February 2022.
I slipped on the wet pavement. I got to my feet and soon discovered it was five hours earlier. This was not the first time this had happened -- I knew all the signs. My phone was not broken, it was really five hours earlier. The newspaper on the ground confirmed it. The paper was bone dry, even though it had been raining cats and dogs, or big sloppy drops, anyway, where I had just been, right here, a split second ago.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Fiction
Review of 'Suspicion' 1.3
You may recall in my review of the excellent two-episode debut of Suspicion last week, I wondered why, though there were only four masked kidnappers of Leo Newman at the beginning, and only three suspects taken in by London police plus one murdering suspect on the loose (3 + 1 = 4), the description of the series on IMDb, Wikipedia, etc., as well the above publicity photo, say or show five kidnappers not four. Tonight, at the very end of episode 1.3, we find out why: there is indeed a 5th suspect, Eddie Walker, who helped with the getaway but was not in the original hall of the kidnapping. And he's a student at Oxford, where Tara (one of the three London suspects now under surveillance) happily teaches.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Criminal
