Frank Kermode taught me how to read Shakespeare, so when I heard the sad news that he had died, I went back and reread his own essay on Auden teaching Shakespeare at the New School in the mid 1940s.
At one point, Kermode takes up Auden on Antony and Cleopatra and then becomes swept Read More
When I was a boy, “dirty” was the epithet of choice for the hated other. It wasn’t enough to call someone any of the slurs for being Jewish or black or Latino. You had to put “dirty” before it.
The genealogy of the insult was firmly established in the history of the world. Your tribe-your Read More
Maybe the only virtue of the warp speed with which information flies at us these days is that we can see, right before our eyes, how prejudice burns away the facts as it hardens into absolute conviction. The facts about the Islamic center that is slated to be constructed near ground zero were reported just Read More
Liberal commentary resembles that band of escaped convicts in Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run, who break out of prison shackled to each other at the ankle and have to do everything as a group, like walking along the street and eating in a restaurant. Barack Obama is elected president, and the Read More
Seeing Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right—seeing her face register a spectrum of feeling as if it were the evening news—I was more than ever convinced that she is one of the greatest ever American film actors. And it’s all in that magnificent face, which is arguably the face of our Read More
I have two reactions to the latest Mel-gate. The first is that I couldn’t give a hoot about Mr. Gibson, a mega-celebrity who has clearly lost control of his life. The second is: There but for the grace of God go we.
I don’t mean that we all harbor barely suppressed racism, Read More
A couple of weeks ago on the op-ed page of The New York Times, Camille Paglia declared Americans sexually dead. Some months before that, the essayist Katie Roiphe declared male American novelists literarily dead in the description-of-sex department. Just about a year ago, the critic Cristina Nehring published a book, The Vindication of Read More
For all his talk about transparency and access, President Obama harbors a shattering secret-well, shattering to some people. It was blown wide open months before the election that made him president, and it recently surfaced again. Most of you have heard by now that Mr. Obama is gay. His favorite sexual partner is his Read More
Amid all the hubbub provoked by The New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40″ list, one elephant-sized fact has been hidden in plain view. Fiction has become culturally irrelevant.
A great novel, one that is for the ages, can still be written. Memorable stories, long and short, continue to be created. Without a doubt, the next Read More
I’m not one who thinks that newspapers are going to become obsolete anytime soon, but there is no question that the new pressures faced by the media business are influencing the way newspapers represent what’s happening in the world. Consider the shameful way in which technology is often reported.
What newspaper publishers and their Read More
