Fall 2024

In my freshman year, when this green kid from the Midwest met Irving Howe, I told him I had read Fathers and Sons that summer and could not understand how anyone could compare Turgenev to Dostoevsky. “You will,” he replied. …

In the course of duty your culture commentator finds himself in L.A., attending yet another gathering of the stars who either make us what we are or reflect our dreams of glory. He wanders past banks of refrigerators, among indoor …

One balmy spring evening I am honored to give the Diana Vreeland Lecture at the Institute of Cultural Significance in San Francisco. Here is a chance, I think, to discuss a new kind of socially oriented African-American feature movie. Yet …

Two hot-selling, over-analyzed gossip books— Julia Phillips’s You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again and Kitty Kelley’s Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography—give pause to consider the peculiar symbiosis that exists between those who acquire power in our society and …

Sunday morning in the capital city of a midwestern state. Four people sit at a table in the corner of a deserted hotel ballroom, sipping dreadful coffee and eating scrambled eggs and sweet rolls. They are there because the SENATOR …

Three middle-aged friends emerge from a movie cubicle in a postmodern pink stucco cinemadrome, where they have just seen the latest David Lynch film, Wild at Heart. Crossing the Culture Center, they confront twenty-three restaurants and food shops and, after …

For whose benefit did President Bush invade Panama? How does it affect this country that Bush did not consult Congress? Will the invasion result in better living conditions for Latin America? Will it further long-run objectives of peace, justice, freedom? …

By the time you read this, Time Inc. will have bought up Warner Bros., or Paramount will have taken over Time, or perhaps both Warner’s and Time. The stockholders with the right information will have their windfall, some executives will …

I wonder how we incorporate the images we receive through the media. Do we take them as fact, believe what we see? Or if not, how do we use what we don’t literally believe? The question is raised in new …

Joan Didion, in a needle-sharp piece in the New York Review of Books, describes Michael Dukakis outside his campaign plane on a broiling day, playing catch with a baseball. Every reporter and every television crew participant knows the action is …

It never fails. The man who survives the nutty primary system and wins the Democratic nomination is hailed for a while as a media genius—and his staff is full of geniuses, too. It happened to McGovern, Carter, and Mondale—and now …

television is never in itself decisive. I learned this in 1972, when New York’s most notorious TV operative confided to me how he would make John Lindsay president. In ’84, the two debates showed Ronald Reagan as a man whose touch with reality is tenuous. …