During a wide-ranging conversation I had with Primo Levi in his home in Turin in the summer of 1985, two years before his death, I asked him what effect Auschwitz had on him as a writer.

I grew up on dance films, although they weren’t known as such; they were called musicals.

Although the producers of the Academy Awards ceremony like to boast that a billion people watch their broadcast, I take comfort in knowing that another 5 billion do not.

On a trip to Russia in 1995 I was told by the young writers I met there that when a certain famed Soviet novelist returned to his native land, he was an offensive anachronism to them.

On the fourth of August last year in San Antonio, the Alamo rumbled.

Flirtatious and ferocious at the same time, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stamps the world stage over Kosovo, threatening fire from heaven if Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic does no

Since the collapse of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union, many on the left seem to have swallowed the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism.

Trotsky is both the hero of the Russian Revolution–the mastermind of October, the founder of the Red Army–and also its Job, hounded across a “planet without a visa,” his family exterminated, hi

For the past year and a half, I’ve been spending most of my time between 1922 and 1979–the years of Charles Mingus’s birth and death, since I’m writing his biography, due to be published next ye

The scene with which The Good Citizen opens could have been lifted straight from a Norman Rockwell painting.