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About fifteen years ago, my roommate and I developed a classification system for TV and movies. Each title was slotted into one of four categories: Good-Good; Bad-Good; Good-Bad; Bad-Bad. The…

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Alex and Wendy love culture. It’s how they spend their free time. It’s what they talk about at dinner parties. When they go jogging or to the gym, they listen…

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Within about fifteen years, China’s economy will surpass America’s and become the largest in the world. As this moment approaches, meanwhile, a consensus has formed in Washington that China poses…

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Before he died, my father reminded me that when I was four and he asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be…

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The newspapers these days are full of sex scenes. Tales of exhibitionists, frottage specialists, voyeurs. I would normally be heartened to read about so much perversion, in the respectable press…

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It is not beyond reason that it is also the psychotic in men that drives them to greatness.  — W. Eugene Smith Near the end of 1954, at thirty-five, the…

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A formative experience of my life occurred the day — I was then twenty years old and a student at the City College of New York — that an English…

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In so many ways they were made for each other, as if a casting director considered Donald Trump and Saturday Night Live side by side and said, Yes, I can…

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Archie Randolph Ammons, one of the great American poets of the twentieth century, never became as widely known as his contemporaries. He avoided reading his poems in public (“I get…

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The disgraced broadcaster’s distortions of history

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As I write these words, American pundits and political junkies are struggling to come to terms with some curious, even alarming, developments. Donald Trump has claimed the Republican presidential nomination…

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A naked man grabs me by the lapels and bares his teeth in frustration. I say naked, when I mean clad in a skintight nude suit that delineates his six-pack…

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I saw the Watts Towers — or a picture of them, at any rate — before I’d heard about them, before I knew what they were. They’re in the background…

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1. On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign from office. I was playing in the street in San Luis Obispo when I heard. I had…

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For me, the epiphany came during Episode 404, broadcast on June 24 of last year. Here’s the setup. Bruce Pitcher, somewhere north of 350 pounds at the commencement of the…

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A little more than a hundred years ago, a bird named Martha, the last surviving passenger pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Her death was remarkable in the annals of…

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Per Se (“Through Itself”) lives on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Center, a shopping mall at Columbus Circle, close to Central Park. It is by reputation — which…

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A new kind of disenchantment has come over literature. It has to do with what you might call the working myth of the life of literature — the half-conscious way…

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In the old days, when a new movie arrived at the theater, it was a collection of heavy, cumbersome cans containing the reels of 35-millimeter film. That physicality has nearly…

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The miracle of Straight Life

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My father always stressed the importance of blood — being worthy of it, showing loyalty to it, protecting what he called the purity of it. He was, as people sometimes…

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In the beginning, William Blake writes a gonzo mythopoeia called Milton: All that can be annihilated must be annihilatedThat the Children of Jerusalem may be saved from slaveryThere is a…

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There’s a new definition of literature in town. It has been slouching toward us for some time now but may have arrived officially in 2009, with the publication of Greil…

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One night last April, I walked from my house in Gainesville, Florida, to the Matheson Museum, a shy brick building hidden by a thicket of palmettos and so small that…

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Much of the story of twentieth-century art can be told as a series of acts of vandalism. Cubist collage attacked the expectation that a painting should look like something in…

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In Barcelona I have a car waiting to take me to Sitges, a half-hour drive down the Catalan coast. I’m two days ahead of my cousin Tim, who arranged for…

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Not long after moving to Oskaloosa, a town of 725 people in the hills of northeastern Kansas, Roger Barker, the new chair of the psychology department at the University of…

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