Books & the Arts

Ghazal for Lauren Ghazal for Lauren

Sister, they say heed the hymn in your heart. You've learned you've an odd rhythm in your heart. You and I versus our brothers: pitched war. The four of us in the swim of your ...

May 30, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Leslie Chang

Barnett Newman and the Heroic Sublime Barnett Newman and the Heroic Sublime

Henry James could not resist giving the hero of his 1877 novel The American the allegorical name "Newman," but he went out of his way to describe him as a muscular Christian, to d...

May 30, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

Singing to Power Singing to Power

British folk-rocker Billy Bragg has to be the only popular musician who could score some airtime with a song about the global justice movement. The first single from Bragg's En...

May 30, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Hillary Frey

Singing to Power Singing to Power

British folk-rocker Billy Bragg has to be the only popular musician who could score some airtime with a song about the global justice movement. The first single from Bragg's Engla...

May 29, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Hillary Frey

Yaqui Way of Knowledge Yaqui Way of Knowledge

Although Chicano identity has been Luis Valdez's theme since all but the earliest years of El Teatro Campesino, the guerrilla theater he founded in the 1960s, getting a clear sens...

May 23, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Hal Gelb

The Evolution of Darwinism The Evolution of Darwinism

Popular perception notwithstanding, the theory of natural selection was accepted by every serious evolutionist long before Darwin. Earlier scientists interpreted it as the cleares...

May 23, 2002 / Books & the Arts / David Hawkes

Sleepless in Nightmute Sleepless in Nightmute

You may recall Insomnia as a Norwegian film made on a modest budget--do I repeat myself?--about the inner life of a morally compromised police detective. The picture enjoyed a sma...

May 23, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Custom Custom

There is a difference it used to make, seeing three swans in this versus four in that quadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as its effects were. Declarations ...

May 23, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Carl Phillips

Pursued by Love’s Demons Pursued by Love’s Demons

As if the back streets of our local city might dispense with their pyrrhic accumulation of dust and wineful tonality, offer a reprise of love itself, a careless love rendered g...

May 23, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Charlie Smith

Grabitization (Don’t Look) Grabitization (Don’t Look)

Almost everything that is wrong with Washington Post foreign editor David Hoffman's new book about Russia's transformation into a capitalist system, The Oligarchs, can be discerne...

May 23, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Matt Taibbi

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