Bernard-Henri Lévy undid the top three buttons of his shirt as soon as he was done with his oration last night. “Now I’m free!” he said. “My love of freedom goes till that. I never wore a tie in my life. Even in very official circumstances, I never wore a tie. Which is very unusual Read More
The November 8th issue of The New York Review of Books is online, and among other things, it features a sharply worded exchange between Paul Berman and Ian Buruma. The back-and-forth is only the latest installment in an ongiong feud between the two thinkers, which The Observer reported on earlier this month.
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One of the most divisive fault lines in American intellectual life is cracking open again, playing out in the pages of The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The New Republic, and forcing some of the city’s best-known intellectuals to pick sides.
Nearly five years after prominent liberal hawks supported Read More
The hero-worship Barack Obama experienced in New Hampshire followed by the endless references to JFK in the media are, as the Senator said, not about him, they’re about us. And Iraq.
Americans like to think of themselves as idealists. I do. Yet our country has been dragged in the mud for years now by this Read More
My most frequent commenter, a Mr. Anonymous, calls me a “Judenrat” for noting that Leonard Greene, the inventor who takes out ads against the killing of Muslims, is Jewish. Anon goes on:
What difference does it make what religion Leonard Greene is? In the name of fair reporting, why not report the religion of Read MoreOn Monday night, Willa Paskin sat down for a three-hour session with the man who instigated a firestorm in Europe and the Middle East with the simple commissioning of cartoons.
“Those of you who have followed this story closely might know I was sent on vacation by my bosses,” said Flemming Rose, the culture editor Read More
To the Editor:
In my few years in publishing, I’ve observed that it may be more agreeable—and much, much safer—to be the reader of, not the object of, a New York Observer article. A phone message from an Observer writer is so not a good turn of fortune.
In the event, however, Tom Scocca’s writing Read More
