Life in Fluxus Life in Fluxus
John Lennon once characterized his wife, Yoko Ono, as the world's "most famous unknown artist. Everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does." What she was famous for,...
Nov 30, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto
To Hell in His Handbasket To Hell in His Handbasket
Travel writing is a dismal art. From Herodotus, wide-eyed (and perhaps more than a little disoriented) in an India of man-eating ants and black sperm; to Ibn Batuta, the fourteen...
Nov 30, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Akash Kapur
Lennon’s Greatest Hits Lennon’s Greatest Hits
December 8, 2000: It was twenty years ago today that Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon outside the Dakota on West 72nd Street in New York City, bringing whatever was...
Nov 30, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Jon Wiener
After the Renaissance After the Renaissance
A quarter-million people thronged Abraham Lincoln's Memorial that day. In the sweltering August humidity, executive secretary Roy Wilkins gravely announced that Dr. William Edwar...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Kevin Brown
Clipping the Yankee Clipper Clipping the Yankee Clipper
The twentieth century produced few American heroes like Joe DiMaggio. He was arguably the best all-around ballplayer who'd ever taken the field, a unique combination of power, sp...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Peter Schrag
What Is What Was? What Is What Was?
In the Acknowledgments section of his biography of Saul Bellow, James Atlas quotes a somewhat greater biographer, Samuel Johnson: "We know how few can portray a living acquaintan...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Richard Stern
Our Books, Ourselves Our Books, Ourselves
"Simone de Beauvoir said 'Books saved my life.' I think that's true for me," announced Gloria Whelan in accepting her National Book Award recently for Homeless Bird (which won fo...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Art Winslow
Generation Ex- Generation Ex-
To judge from magazine covers, the American divorce rate is either a disaster for children or no problem at all. First came the famous "Dan Quayle Was Right" article in The Atlan...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Andrew J. Cherlin
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