A collection of 210 posts
The reason these books endure and will be read long after the writers of littérature engagée harping on a string of fashionable social trends are ridiculed and forgotten, is their aesthetic impact.
Reviews of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney, Hachette, 465 pages (March 2018) OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind by Jill Filipovic, Atria/One Signal, 336 pages (August 2020) Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom
Amis is in love with English, and the marriage is a healthy one.
Hard as it might be to believe, the years that stretched from roughly 1967 through the bicentennial year of 1976 brought even more foment, outrage, unrest, and upheaval to America than the most recent decade has managed. The escalation of the Vietnam War, the student protests against that war, the
Allergic to narrow-mindedness, poor taste, and moral arrogance, Ellison detested any kind of racial essentialism, separatism, and determinism.
The disrupters rely on rhetorical devices such as replacing the passive “under-represented” with the active “marginalized,” “erased,” and “excluded.”
NOTE: This essay contains spoilers. The surprise success of the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit has brought me a great deal of delight—I’m a longtime fan of both the novel and its author, Walter Tevis. Just this summer, I wrote an essay about all the great American
Anglophone readers may be tempted to call Zamyatin a Russian Orwell, but the description works equally well in the reverse.
Most instructors on campus who revealed their political views also showed themselves to be a part of the Left
This is what censorship looks like in 21st-century America.
Our culture makes a well intentioned but dangerous error in taking every thought experiment, every utterance, every representation, every fantasy of sexual expression seriously.
Like Miller, Orwell didn’t just focus on the “dirty-handkerchief side of life”—he repeatedly confessed to the dirty-handkerchief side of his own personality.
One general conclusion from reading Leys is that although totalitarian movements are immensely dangerous, that doesn’t mean we should give the theories behind them much intellectual weight.
The novel’s composition is a bit cobbled, which Amis acknowledges when he says that he pities the reviewer who has to cross the whole thing front-to-back, recommending instead that the book be taken up at random and read in leaps and snatches.