Becoming Gore Vidal
First posted in The Daily Beast (August 4, 2012) Gore Vidal liked to style himself a populist but for his political leanings this hardly fit tha man at all. Pop...
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The Great Contrarian – Dwight Macdonald
First published in The East Hampton Star (July 19, 2012) Masscult and Midcult (New York Review Books, $16.95) gives us only one phase of Dwight Macdonald’s stor...
Looking Back at the French New Wave
First posted in The Cine-files (May 28, 2012) At a time when movies seem more mass-produced than ever, we have every reason to wax nostalgic about the French N...
The Work of a Critic
First published in the Chronicle Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2, 2012 The role of critics varies greatly according to the mission they im...
Remembering Daniel Bell, 1919-2011
Daniel Bell’s death closes out one of the most expansive and impressive intellectual careers of the twentieth century. He was a teacher of mine during my last t...
The Challenge to Book Culture
On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine a more depressing cultural subject right now than the future of book culture. Publishers are hurting badly; drove...
All in the Family – Jackson Pollock
Published in the Times Literary Supplement, October 28, 2011 In the public mind Jackson Pollock was a tough-guy American artist, a cowboy out of Cody, Wyoming, ...
Battleship Potemkin and Beyond: Film and Revolutionary Politics
Published in Dissent Magazine (Summer 2011). For decades after it came out in 1925, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, portraying an episode in the first ...
“Whose Dog Are You?” (On Light Verse)
Published in Parnassus 32, Vols 1 & 2 (2011) Ogden Nash. The Best of Ogden Nash. Edited by Linell Nash Smith. Ivan R. Dee 2007. 465 pp. $28.95. Ameri...
An Unfinished Writer
The Life of Irene Némirovsky, 1903-1942 By Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt Translated from the French by Euan Cameron Alfred A. Knopf New York, 2010,...