My first instinct was simply to shrug. Don’t respond, I thought. It just encourages them. But then the incoherence, the inaccuracy, the sheer ignorance of the thing became burrs under the saddle and just couldn’t be ignored. It sometimes seems that early in each decade someone grabs a bigger-than-usual megaphone and climbs . . .
Read MoreThe first installment of this blog series was published on February 20. About a third of the way through the novel, after long anticipation, the reader at last finds herself face to face with Captain Ahab—and via Ahab, introduced indirectly to that other looming presence that awaits us somewhere on the horizon, the Whale . . .
Read More(From a Sub-Sub-Intern) At the age of 27, as a soon-to-be Master of the Fine Arts, generally priding himself on the breadth of his reading, I decided at last that it could be put off no longer: it was time to read Moby-Dick. In this blog series, I’ll be attempting to organize my . . .
Read MoreA recent column by Slavoj Žižek on the film Zero Dark Thirty is preceded by a statement of fact and an essential question: “Many have pointed out that Kathryn Bigelow’s film endorses torture. But why has such a film been made now?” I think I can answer that. On January 10, the Oscar nominations were announced, . . .
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Unlike Michael Moore, my dad didn’t work for GM, and my uncle wasn’t a founding member of the UAW. And I grew up in Lansing, not Flint—another car town, but also the state capital. Flint is far enough away that our sports teams didn’t even play each other. By the time Roger & . . .
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Yet how could it be otherwise? In Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers, Jules Chametzky, a founding editor of MR, has assembled his reflections on and recollections of an amazing array of writers, many more than the thirty-one crystalline chapters in this jewel of a book. Not least among its contributions . . .
Read MoreChristopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy has generated a disproportionate interest and enthusiasm, even among those who would not normally take notice of an action or superhero film (I count myself here). The trilogy clearly takes itself more seriously than most of the films in its genre, and surely the Batman story itself is better . . .
Read MoreBack in early March, when the NGO Invisible Children posted their video Kony 2012 on YouTube and Facebook, the result was unprecedented in any sort of social networking, and inconceivable within the world of human rights organizations. Within weeks the film had been viewed over 100 million times, making it to date the single . . .
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Like any enduring cultural form, the novel has many origins, and its history has been told many times. Safe to say, in any case, that our ideas about psychology and our techniques for novelistic characterization were born as twins. One parent, certainly, was the early modern pseudo-science of physiognomy, which the OED . . .
Read More“Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans: all I knew of the South Slavs.”—Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Anyone in the US with even a passing interest in contemporary fiction has by now heard the ovations given to Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. The New Yorker introduced Obreht as . . .
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