Nation Topics - Books and Ideas | The Nation

"A university," poet John Ciardi acidly observed, "is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students." Add this contemporary counterpunch: A college is what a university becom

Asked where he was coming from, my friend's son replied, "From the demo against the death of Sartre." It was April 19, 1980, and the definition fitted perfectly, for Sartre's funeral, attended by

You will recall that when Augie March went to Mexico, he hooked up with an eagle, which he called Caligula.

Perhaps one of the most fatuous theories ever promulgated was Francis Fukuyama's "End of History," put forth just as, in most parts of the world, history resumed its sanguinary progress as soon a

With the twenty-fifth anniversary of the American withdrawal from Vietnam hard upon us, readers and viewers may well be treated to a multitude of reprises of the arguments surrounding the war and

In Moby-Dick, in the chapter "The Fossil Whale," Ishmael proclaims: "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme." The theme of Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde--well, it's a

After Troy

Not quite putting on what little power or knowledge
pigeons lay claim to, she nonetheless bids them come.
Launched off cornices,

Shortly before he died, Bruce Chatwin found God. This was on top of Mount Athos, after which he left for Katmandu. Looking down from the bees and grapes, he had seen an iron cross on a wet rock.

It is delightfully ironic that a site has been approved for the construction of a monument in Martin Luther King Jr.'s name on the Washington Mall, given that in the last months of his life, King

Noam Chomsky is a longtime political activist, writer and professor of linguistics at MIT.