Cultural Criticism and Analysis

Starting Out in the ’50s Starting Out in the ’50s

The best memoirs of recent years reveal "The Way We Live Now" as well as or better than most contemporary fiction.

Oct 23, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Dan Wakefield

Shooting Wars Shooting Wars

In her new book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag's focus is upon theaters of war and the way in which photographers have interpreted their role in the production of ...

Sep 18, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Peter Wollen

Walt Whitman Walt Whitman

In 1848, 29-year-old Walt Whitman was for three months a reporter for the Daily Crescent in New Orleans, writing fluff pieces about local color and charm as seen through Yankee...

Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Richard Gambino

American Rebels American Rebels

Introduction

Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Jack Newfield

Hors de Combat Hors de Combat

She's the ultimate quick-change artist, with a style that can absorb any trend and an image to match. She's gone from material girl to S/M maitresse, from power diva to content...

Apr 9, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Richard Goldstein

War and Remembrance War and Remembrance

In a provocative book published recently in Germany, a Hamburg scholar named Klaus Briegleb appeared to take on the entire national literary establishment for indulging in self...

Mar 13, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Hugh Eakin

Neo-Macho Man Neo-Macho Man

Say what you will about oil and hegemony, but the pending invasion of Iraq is more than just a geopolitical act. It's also the manifestation of a cultural attitude.

Mar 6, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Richard Goldstein

Mary McCarthy at 90 Mary McCarthy at 90

Mary McCarthy would have turned 90 on June 21, a fact that is itself astonishing to those who remember her flagrant youth, when her sharp style made her the most feared and forthri...

Aug 15, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Morris Dickstein

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

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

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