Summer Celluloid Meltdown

Scratch a philosopher, find a reductionist revolutionary.

The estimates of the number of books written about World War I are in the hundreds of thousands.

Has anyone read John Dennis? Irving Babbitt? Gorham Munson? Probably not, though they were considered important critics in their day.

"Austria had many geniuses, and that was probably its undoing."
    --Robert Musil

Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can't go home again. Alix Kates Shulman disagrees.

For contemporary reactions from Nation critics to the films of Stanley Kubrick, follow these links: Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Shining (1980), all reviewed by Robert Hatch, and Full Metal Jacket (1987), reviewed by Terrence Rafferty.

If Russia is not to dissolve like the Soviet Union or, worse yet, end in a cataclysm like Yugoslavia's, it must negotiate peacefully across a welter of emotional claims to self-determination.

Public scandals are America's favorite parlor sport. Learning about the flaws and misdeeds of the rich and famous seems to satisfy our egalitarian yearnings.

This book is aimed at business executives, but political reporters may have to read it too, now that Republican front-runner George W. Bush has decided that global warming is real after all.