Spring 2024

From Jack Robin to Bob Dylan

Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988-2001 by Stuart Klawans Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002, 340 pp., $15.95 Around a decade ago, the Nation started publishing a movie critic who not only displayed the brains, sensitivity, social conscience, …

Stand in Times Square at night, thrown every way by waves of light and people. It is easy to feel that you are in the belly of some great beast, and that the beast is being fed more and richer …

Last winter, Dissent published a symposium called “Where Will Critical Culture Come From?” Our thinking was organized around an image coined by Jules Feiffer in a 1998 cartoon. He portrayed a man who criticizes New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s policy …

Considering the mass murder and Nazi-style brutality that engulf so much of the world in the 1990s, it takes chutzpah for an American to say that our collective life contains any trouble at all. Our economy is thriving. It wasn’t …

In 1989, my life was coming apart, and there wasn’t a thing I could do. It was hard to get through the day, and even harder to make it through the night. That year I really loved my TV set. …

The big thing about any New York neighborhood is its relationship to the center. The city center in Manhattan, with its spectacular cluster of big buildings and bright lights, has a magical aura. It is the focal point of every …

My beach book this past summer was Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld. Near Asbury Park, on a beach that was eroding by the hour, where the emergency jetty was blown away and the surf rushed at us like a gang …

As the new Times Square takes shape, this is a good time to think about what’s special about it, the ways in which we love it and hate it and love to hate it. Since the completion and convergence of …

I love museums, but I don’t expect to get deliriously excited in them. However, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Picasso and Portraiture” exhibit last summer knocked me out. Thousands of people jammed the place, and circled and spiraled through it …

As we lurch toward the end of the twentieth century, it is easy to think that our public discourse has gone through a core meltdown. The cold war is over, and we are free from the fear that our leaders …

Being an intellectual at the end of the twentieth century means you won’t get rich, and your ideas, if you have ideas of your own, will be generally ignored. But you will get lots of chances to travel. On one …

The hymns of praise that followed Irving’s death overlooked one of his most special qualities: his capacity to change and grow, at a time of life—his fifties and sixties—when most people stagnate or shrink. But we can’t appreciate his growth …

One of the marks of modern times is that masses of ordinary people have come to believe that their children’s lives could be a lot better than their own. Over the last two centuries, as the world has opened up, …