The Loneliest Road The Loneliest Road
Late in the evening in back-road America you tend to pick the motels with a few cars parked in front of the rooms. There's nothing less appealing than an empty courtyard, with ma...
Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Alexander Cockburn
Big Food’s Real Appetites Big Food’s Real Appetites
More than the much-reviled products of Big Tobacco, big helpings and Big Food constitute the number-one threat to America's children, especially when the fare is helpings of fats,...
Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Ian Williams
Education of a Knife Education of a Knife
The third-year medical student held the intravenous catheter, poised to insert it into a patient's vein. Suddenly the patient asked, "Have you done this before?" As the student la...
Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Barron H. Lerner
The Pull of ‘New Gravity’ The Pull of ‘New Gravity’
In an end-of-the-year column devoted to "Politics and Prose," Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, asserted that there had been a "new gravity" and "sobriety" to American jo...
Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Mark Mordue
Sensation Sensation
A friend and I were sitting around commiserating about the things that get to us: unloading small indignities, comparing thorns. "So there I was," she said, "sitting on the bus a...
Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Patricia J. Williams
It’s Only a Beginning It’s Only a Beginning
Nearly four years have elapsed since that merry month of May when France and the whole world were taken aback by a sudden and momentous upheaval.
Apr 17, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Singer
Talking With Jeff Tweedy Talking With Jeff Tweedy
Jeff Tweedy may be best known to Nation readers as Billy Bragg's collaborator (along with his band Wilco) on the Mermaid Avenue recordings of recent years--two great albums that s...
Apr 11, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Hillary Frey
Witness in the Territories Witness in the Territories
In the last days of March, at the end of a five-day voyage with seven fellow members of the International Parliament of Writers (IPW) through the battered archipelago of reservat...
Apr 11, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Russell Banks
The Undertaker’s Art, Exhumed The Undertaker’s Art, Exhumed
"It's a great mistake not to feel pleased when you have the chance," a rich, disfigured spinster advises a frail, well-mannered boy in The Shrimp and the Anemone, the first novel ...
Apr 11, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Caleb Crain
The Show They Love to Hate The Show They Love to Hate
There is an overall disposition to approach each Whitney Biennial as a State of the Art World Address in the form of an exhibition, organized by a curatorial directorate, present...
Apr 11, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto