Books & the Arts

Screen Rage Screen Rage

One of the most persistent myths in the culture wars today is that social science has proven "media violence" to cause adverse effects. The debate is over; the evidence is over...

Jul 3, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Marjorie Heins

1776 and All That 1776 and All That

The country is riven and ailing, with a guns-plus-butter nuttiness in some of its governing echelons and the sort of lapsed logic implicit in the collapse of trust in money-center...

Jul 3, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Edward Hoagland

Future Shock Future Shock

In Steven Spielberg's latest picture, a skinheaded psychic named Agatha keeps challenging Tom Cruise with the words, "Can you see?" The question answers itself: Cruise sees in ...

Jul 3, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Poisoned Ivy Poisoned Ivy

Much as I hate to, I'm going to start by talking about the damn money. I'm only doing it because almost everyone else is. It's not just the author profiles and publishing-trad...

Jul 3, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Gene Seymour

Voiding Checkbook Politics Voiding Checkbook Politics

Even as campaign finance reformers celebrated the long-awaited passage of the McCain-Feingold bill this spring, they cautioned the public not to assume the fight for reform was ov...

Jun 27, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Jane Manners

Black Unlike Me Black Unlike Me

Historians have made much of the ways that the social protest movements of the 1960s unsettled the morals of the dominant culture, but it is often forgotten that activists themselv...

Jun 27, 2002 / Books & the Arts / John McMillian

The Thrill Is Gone The Thrill Is Gone

It's easy to rephrase Tolstoy's opening to Anna Karenina so it describes junkies, who all share an essential plot line: Who and how to hustle in order to score. But in the world o...

Jun 27, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro

In Cold Type In Cold Type

Southern Exposure, which somehow looks--even in its third decade, in the twenty-first century--as if very advanced high school students had just stapled it together and put it on ...

Jun 27, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Amy Wilentz

‘The Enemy Within’ ‘The Enemy Within’

There are perfectly respectable reasons to disagree with, dislike or distrust Jesse Jackson. His flaws as a human being are pretty well-known at this point. Some feel his politics...

Jun 27, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Patricia J. Williams

Jefferson’s Patsy? Jefferson’s Patsy?

No one has contributed more to the United States than James Madison. He was the principal architect of the Constitution, the brilliant theorist who, more than any other single ind...

Jun 20, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Carl T. Bogus

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