Spring 2024

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein Norton, 2009, 598 pp., $29.95 Need it be said we live in gloomy times? The most optimistic among our commentariat talk of a jobless recovery: the …

Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again by David Frum Doubleday, 2008, 213 pp., $24.95 The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History by Donald T. Critchlow Harvard University Press, 2007, 359 pp., $27.95 They Knew They Were Right: …

Few of us will forget November 2004. I remember driving myself to the point of pneumonia, having spent the previous two months making “persuasion” calls to my fellow Ohioans during the evenings and doing weekend “lit drops” in tiny rural …

The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege by Damon Linker

An argument over Cold War liberalism

When I think about intellectuals and movies, I think of Susan Sontag. For Sontag, movies were the most promising form of modernist expression, in part, because they elided the domineering and interpretative hubris of the intelligentsia. “In good films, there …

Watching the History Channel

Sometimes where and when you first read a book matters. In graduate school while I was studying American intellectual history, my adviser, Christopher Lasch, suggested I crack open Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Vital Center. As a young leftist, it …

“People like me have to save liberals from themselves.” -Michael Moore Strange things happen when the world of entertainment crashes into politics. Remember those “Rock the Vote” scandals a few years back? Big celebrities like Madonna and Jewel sermonized to …