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
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
Riding the Third Wave Riding the Third Wave
I have been waiting for Manifesta to come out. I had certain hopes for this book. In particular, I was looking forward to using it as a corrective addition in a course I'm teachi...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Michelle Jensen
Liberalism: In Search Of Liberalism: In Search Of
A half-century after the appearance of The Vital Center, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s spirited political polemic, we have more than sufficient cause to meditate on what might be called...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Paul Buhle
On Shooting at Elephants On Shooting at Elephants
They laughed when I sat down with these two writers--and never mind that both books arrived in the same box. The bad gay boy and the cold war saint! The apostle of derangement an...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / John Leonard
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