Nation Topics - Cultural Criticism and Analysis | The Nation

Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble With Diversity challenges us to remove our race-tinted glasses and view the world in the class-based terms that, he argues, define it.

Stuart Klawans reviews Fast Food Nation, a film that aspires to activism as it undermines its own anticorporate message.

Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate details the trials of
a very smug and special class of parents raising children in
post-9/11 New York.

Reviews of films from the vulgar to the magisterial: Borat, Flags of Our Fathers, For Your Consideration, Our Daily Bread and Fur.

Famine is at its worst when people waste away and die. But there is
another kind of famine: the death of the human soul--the emptiness and
senseless cynicism in this country that has taken up residence in our
hearts.

Philip Roth and Joan Didion have each written compellingly about death,
but their insights about dying and mourning signify a retreat from the
world rather than an embrace of the forces by which we all live and die.

Like radical Islamists and American interventionists, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin and Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam Today express great concern for Muslim women. But the trouble is not necessarily with Islam.

In Songs of Experience, Martin Jay examines modern debates over the relationship between theory and the lived world.

Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, written during the cultural renaissance that followed the Mexican Revolution, is a marvel of storytelling and testament to the power of the word.

In Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, Stefan Collini encapsulates the paradoxes that dominate discussion of the English cultural landscape.