The Plot Against Equality The Plot Against Equality
Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble With Diversity challenges us to remove our race-tinted glasses and view the world in the class-based terms that, he argues, define it.
Dec 7, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Robert S. Boynton
Unhappy Meal Unhappy Meal
Stuart Klawans reviews Fast Food Nation, a film that aspires to activism as it undermines its own anticorporate message.
Nov 30, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
The Man Who Loved Children The Man Who Loved Children
Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate details the trials of a very smug and special class of parents raising children in post-9/11 New York.
Nov 22, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Suzy Hansen
Coming to America! Coming to America!
Reviews of films from the vulgar to the magisterial: Borat, Flags of Our Fathers, For Your Consideration, Our Daily Bread and Fur.
Nov 16, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Cultural Famine: A Cycle Cultural Famine: A Cycle
Famine is at its worst when people waste away and die. But there is another kind of famine: the death of the human soul--the emptiness and senseless cynicism in this country that h...
Oct 8, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Walter Mosley
Death Trip Death Trip
Philip Roth and Joan Didion have each written compellingly about death, but their insights about dying and mourning signify a retreat from the world rather than an embrace of the f...
Oct 5, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Richard Goldstein
The Missionary Position The Missionary Position
Like radical Islamists and American interventionists, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin and Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam Today express great concern for Muslim women. But...
Jun 1, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Laila Lalami
Keeping It Real Keeping It Real
In Songs of Experience, Martin Jay examines modern debates over the relationship between theory and the lived world.
May 24, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Jackson Lears
Dead Souls Dead Souls
Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, written during the cultural renaissance that followed the Mexican Revolution, is a marvel of storytelling and testament to the power of the word.
May 18, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Carmen Boullosa
Zones of Disengagement Zones of Disengagement
In Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, Stefan Collini encapsulates the paradoxes that dominate discussion of the English cultural landscape.
May 11, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Richard Vinen