Lastest Stories by John Harrington

To be a blockbuster, a motion picture needs at least some of these elements: a well-crafted plot, engaging characters, even-handed pacing, action in varying amounts, and confident direction.  Since...
Genres come and go on television, but comedies and dramas centered on the family have never fallen out of favor.  To determine America’s favorite TV families, 24/7 Tempo developed an index based...
The world’s greatest winter sports athletes will convene in Beijing in February for the 24th Winter Olympic Games. The first Winter Olympics were held in 1924 at Chamonix in France, and over the...
Grace. Elegance. Pride. Defiance. Pioneer. Any one, or all, of these words describe the character of Sidney Poitier, the trailblazing Black actor who almost single-handedly changed America’s...
We all look forward to the weekend, and movie companies are no exception. It’s the best opportunity to debut a film and maximize its viewership – though opportunities were few in 2020, as the...
French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin was the visionary who dreamed of reviving the Olympic Games. He believed such an event should be global and that “all people must be allowed in, without...
The best gangster movies are commentaries on why some people can’t, or won’t, assimilate into a civil society. These films often depict their protagonists as victims of their environment –...
On Tuesday, Jan. 25, David Ortiz became the latest player to be selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Dominican-born Ortiz was the only player to receive more than 75% of the votes from sports...
There were 2.7 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses among private-industry employees in 2020, a drop of 5.7% from 2.8 million in 2019, the  Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in...
With the second anniversary of the pandemic nearing, we don’t need to be reminded of the deadliness of viruses. As of Jan. 22, 5.58 million deaths worldwide have been attributed to the novel...
The 2020 presidential election has gone down as among the most divisive in American history. The bitterness of the campaign culminated in the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C., in which supporters of...
America was born out of conflict, and much of the history of the United States has been punctuated by war. The United States has fought wars for independence, the preservation of its union, maritime...
In 2021 NASA landed a new robotic rover Perseverance on Mars, the space agency’s most ambitious and successful effort in decades to directly study whether there ever was life on the red planet that...
Each of the 50 states that comprise the United States of America has its own shape. How their shapes were determined provides insight into how the United States became a nation like no other. 24/7...
A cover version is a new performance of a song originally recorded by somebody else. When an artist covers a song made famous by another performer, it is an homage to the song and the songwriter. Far...