Free Republic

It is a long way from the uneven streets of 1896 New York City to the well-heeled slopes of Park City, but TNT’s The Alienist will feel right at home at this year’s Sundance Film Festival among the top-notch films premiering over the next week. With a preview screening set for January 19 at the festival ahead of its January 22 premiere, the limited series starring Dakota Fanning, Daniel Brühl and Luke Evans based on Caleb Carr’s 1994 bestseller is a great yarn that has been deftly translated into a fine drama.

As the mayoral campaign of Bill de Blasio moves on, the revelation that the likely victor was a Sandinista supporter as a young man in the 1980s has begun to be noticed. It made de Blasio actually have to respond to his Republican opponent, Joe Lhota, who had condemned him as a “Marxist.” But instead of saying something to the effect that he was young, idealistic, and perhaps wrong about Nicaragua, he openly defended his positions.In an interview with Capital, a Manhattan-based publication, de Blasio argued that U.S. policies in Central America in the ’80s “were wrong,” and that...