COLUMNIST

Glenn Garvin, the Miami Herald's TV critic, covered Latin America for 19 years -- the last five of them as The Herald's bureau chief in Managua. A 1975 graduate of Stanford University, Garvin is the author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras and (with Ana Rodriguez) Diary of a Survivor: Nineteen Years in a Cuban Women's Prison. Click here to e-mail him. Don't miss his television blog, Changing Channels .

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IN MY OPINION

Many unanswered questions in Edward Snowden saga

Edward Snowden, a contract employee at the National Security Agency, is the source of The Guardian's disclosures about the U.S. government's secret surveillance programs.

The only thing more aggravating than Christmas shopping ads before the Fourth of July — yes, I saw one over the weekend — is a journalist making “best of the year” lists with six months still to go. I’m not going to go quite that far, but I am willing to declare a sure winner for The Most Tedious Phrase of 2013:

Screen gems: What’s ahead in movies and on TV for the week of June 30

The week ahead at the movies and on TV
IN MY OPINION

Glenn Garvin: Congress plots exit from Obamacare coverage

Congress is not as stupid as you think.
IN MY OPINION

Glenn Garvin: War Party beats drums for action in Syria

Is a dangerous partisan divide really destroying the American government? It’s pretty hard to discern that from the policy debate on Syria, where our two-party system divides like this: Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky on one side, and everybody else on the other.
IN MY OPINION

Glenn Garvin: Welcome to ‘unwelcome’ speech on campus

I know it was hard to hear anything last week over the cacophony of the White House roof falling over Benghazi, the IRS and spying on reporters. But still, I was surprised there wasn’t more fuss about the Obama administration’s war on Shakespeare.
IN MY OPINION

Ugly truth: Sometimes, torture works

John Kenneth Galbraith once observed that “the enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.” And events have finally caught up with the oft-repeated claim that torture doesn’t work and that it especially didn’t work in tracking down Osama bin Laden.
IN MY OPINION

Murder? Not if you just kill a baby

Nearly a quarter-century has passed since The Los Angeles Times published a piece by the late David Shaw, then its media critic, arguing that the anti-abortion viewpoint didn’t get fair treatment in the news media. Among the anecdotes he used to illustrate his case was that of a Boston Globe reporter who turned in a story on late-term abortions only to have an editor reject a sentence that described the operation “destroying” the fetus by “crushing forming skulls and bones.” Said the editor: “As far as I’m concerned, until that thing is born, it is really no different from a kidney; it is part of the woman’s body.” So to use the word “destroy,” the editor continued “is really to distort the issue.”
IN MY OPINION

Glenn Garvin: Super Bowl ads disturbingly delightful

I spent the entire Super Bowl hoping for an equipment malfunction — and no, not on the how-the-hell-does-that-thing-stay-up corset Beyoncé wore during her halftime performance.
Screen gems

The week ahead at the movies and on TV