Butler: Is It All Greek? Butler: Is It All Greek?
Judith Butler, who is a Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is a troublemaker. She announced as much when sh...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Georgette Fleischer
Coming of Age in Venezuela Coming of Age in Venezuela
A few years back, critics of postmodernism, both left and right, chuckled at the academic sting pulled on the journal Social Text when it published Alan Sokal's bogus article on ...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Greg Grandin
Riding the Third Wave Riding the Third Wave
I have been waiting for Manifesta to come out. I had certain hopes for this book. In particular, I was looking forward to using it as a corrective addition in a course I'm teachi...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Michelle Jensen
Remembering Ring Remembering Ring
The quiet grace of Ring Lardner Jr., who died the other week at 85, seemed at odds with these noisy, thumping times. I cannot imagine Ring playing Oprah or composing one of those...
Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Roger Kahn
The ‘Ism’ That Won the Century The ‘Ism’ That Won the Century
To buy or not to buy turns out to have been the question of the century in America--Just Do It or Just Say No. And in the past fifteen years, consumer society has moved to the ce...
Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Lawrence B. Glickman
The Martian Chronicles The Martian Chronicles
Long before Carrie-Anne Moss rips open Val Kilmer's shirt and begins pounding his chest, providing him with a version of CPR that she must have learned from a Japanese drum troup...
Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Coronation by Cornet Coronation by Cornet
LOUIS ARMSTRONG AT 100 In 1927 a young cornetist led his band into a meticulously hilarious version of a classic composition Jelly Roll Morton had made famous, "Twelfth St...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro
Ring Lardner Jr. (1915-2000) Ring Lardner Jr. (1915-2000)
The last chapter in Ring Lardner Jr.'s new memoir, I'd Hate Myself in the Morning (Nation Books), is called "Sole Survivor." When Lardner, who died October 31, wrote it he was in...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Victor Navasky
Romancing the Screen Romancing the Screen
VINCENT CANBY As a memorial tribute to Vincent Canby, the "Arts & Leisure" section of the New York Times recently published half a page of excerpts of his prose, as se...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Mr. Sammler’s Planet Mr. Sammler’s Planet
What ought to be read--and why--are questions that have a unique urgency in a multicultural milieu, where each group fights, legitimately, for its own space and voice. In the pas...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans