One of the great canonical shifts of recent decades has been the enthusiastic rediscovery of earlier American painting. Thanks to the success of the abstract expressionists after the war, Americans began to realize that they too had a world-class art, …
On June 15, 1990, the Los Angeles police attacked a peaceful demonstration of janitors and their supporters in the tony Century City district of Los Angeles. Local 399 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was seeking a union contract …
Has the American culture that could once generate an Edmund Wilson become incapable of generating anyone similar today? Has something fundamental changed in American life, and is the age of critics-in-general (and readers-in-general) behind us? The idea that some such …
Workers have had a difficult time in the move to a market economy in Eastern Europe. In the first few years after 1989, prices skyrocketed and real wages plummeted. Hundreds of thousands have lost once-secure jobs. In June 1996, even …
Even the most sober-spirited could not help but feel a thrill seeing the long line of people on the steps of Columbia University’s Low Library on October 3, trying to get into the opening session of a “Teach-In with the …
Explaining his now famous parody in Social Text’s “Science Wars” issue, Alan Sokal writes in Dissent (“Afterword,” Fall 1996): But why did I do it? I confess I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed …
This past fall, Hilton Kramer, America’s angriest art critic, began his fifteenth year editing the New Criterion, the neocon journal of art and culture. In Kramer’s lead comment in the journal’s “special anniversary issue,” he rededicated the journal to fighting …
If you go to Britain and attend a Labour party rally, you will probably hear the audience sing “The Red Flag.” That song begins, “The people’s flag is deepest red. It’s shrouded oft our martyred dead. But ere their limbs …
I am a product of the social compact that lifted America out of the Great Depression and working Americans into the middle class. My father was an Irish immigrant, a New York City bus driver, and a proud member of …
Why do we worry so much about multiculturalism? The “we” is, as usual, deceptive, for worries about multiculturalism come from different and incompatible directions. For some people, the main complaint is that too many people from minority cultures have been …
The year 1995 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan, and the creation of the United Nations. The founding of Commentary in the same year hardly ranked with …
The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History by Lawrence W. Levine. Beacon Press, 1996. 212 pp. $20.00. Almost ten years ago the collected complaints of a conservative University of Chicago professor became an unexpected bestseller. Allan Bloom, …
“So: tell me about yourself!” At a dinner party in the suburbs, skewered lamb cooking on the grill, the conversational tone flippant, the answer to this question is no longer framed in terms of a hobby, a sign of the …
CENTRAL RAILWAY, SYDNEY In a shit-house stall in Central I saw the one word “Mum” and thought once more of young men torn by want or war or hunger from their families, the West Virginian I wrote of thirty years …
I first encountered Bernie Rosenberg in Social Science B at Brandeis, where we read mimeographed chapters of Max Lerner’s forthcoming book on American civilization, and Max sat on the stage of the largest lecture hall on campus and talked, with …
