Not to start the new year off on a dour note, but do you want to know why so many people have become hopeless about changing the political and economic mechanisms that rule our lives? Watch the 1969 True Grit and then go see the Coen brothers’ recent remake, which has just about all the Read More
On the occasion of the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, allow me to speak bluntly about the chief reason why our involvement there has been such a wretched failure.
It’s simple: We don’t have the guts and the brains to build and sustain an empire. The proof of our inadequacy is that our best Read More
“Nowadays, the Internet and its myriad resources extend to us the mirage of direct action in the form of, among other things, ‘wikiing’ and venting on our Twitter and Tumblr accounts and on all manner of blogs. Nobody is taking to the streets. And so nothing changes. A mighty newspaper publishes an alarming exposé about 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
The Observer has hired National Magazine Award–winning critic and author Lee Siegel as a columnist covering the worlds of business and culture. “Lee Siegel is one of the sharpest voices in journalism today,” said Observer editor Kyle Pope. “We’re thrilled to be able to showcase him in The Observer.” The author of three books, including Read More
AGAINST THE MACHINE: BEING HUMAN IN THE AGE OF THE ELECTRONIC MOB
By Lee Siegel
Spiegel & Grau, 182 pages, $22.95
To read the social critic Lee Siegel’s latest treatise on the deleterious effects of Internet culture is to find oneself exultantly blurting things like “Mmm-hmm!”, “That’s right!” and “Sing it!” Overhearing me ejaculate Read More
The cultural critic Lee Siegel is known as something of a terror for his slashing, razor-sharp essays and reviews. His savage eloquence has ticked off a lot of folk, and his not entirely deserved reputation as a hatchet man—news flash: There’s plenty of stuff Lee Siegel likes—has a way of setting people off. In the Read More
“I made a dumb mistake, and I’m very sorry I did it. I took the blogosphere’s bait, and I stooped to the level of these people who were commenting on my pieces, and I shouldn’t have,” Lee Siegel said. “And I’m especially sorry that I embarrassed a magazine that was nourishing me as an intellectual, Read More
“Writers don’t retire. How can writers retire? I don’t understand the concept.”
E.L. Doctorow’s voice is habitually mild, even watery, but there was a defiant, almost querulous edge to this pronouncement. Though he had already turned 70 when he started writing his big new best-selling novel, The March, he saw nothing unusual in an Read More
The other night, I watched an episode of Over There, a new television drama about the war in Iraq. Afterward, I happened to read an article reporting that ABC was about to start filming a miniseries based on the 9/11 Commission Report—in fact, Thomas Kean, the chairman of the commission, and several of its members Read More
