Books & Arts


Nazis in Tinseltown

Spies, sympathizers—and the watchful Jewish operatives who thwarted their plans.
8:11 PM, Jan 28, 2018

In the late 1930s, or perhaps it was as late as 1940, my father and uncle, the screenwriters Philip and Julius Epstein, sought to join the American armed forces. The Army turned them away; it apparently considered their anti-fascism premature. That, at any rate, is family lore, and I have every reason to believe it. At that point, in the view of much of the government and the country at large, to be against Hitler was to be for Stalin; to be against fascism was to be for communism—by far the greater evil, if indeed Nazism and its ideals were considered evil at all. Add to this equation a third element, the Jews, for in much of the popular imagination the distinction between being an anti-fascist, a Communist, and a Jew did not

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Lee Edwards: Conservative Witness

What the historian of conservatism saw at the (Reagan) revolution.
5:46 PM, Jan 28, 2018

In October 1956, shortly after being honorably discharged from the Army at age 23, Lee Edwards found himself in Paris. There he fell into the rhythms of expatriate life, smoking Gauloises, frequenting cafés, and writing fiction. It was in French newspapers that he read of the Hungarian revolt against Soviet occupation.

At first the Hungarian independence movement seemed victorious. The Soviets retreated from Budapest. The rebel leader, Imre Nagy, withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and began the transition to democracy. “My dormant anticommunism came alive,” Edwards writes in his memoir. “All that I had learned from my reporter-father, who had covered congressional hearings about communism, came

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Jews and Their Jokes

The sources and substance of Jewish humor, from King David to Larry David.
5:37 PM, Jan 28, 2018

“How odd of God / To choose the Jews,” a scrap of verse by the English journalist William Norman Ewer, has over the years had many answering refrains. “Not odd, you Sod / The Jews chose God” is one; “What’s so Odd / His son was one” is another; and a third goes “This surely was no mere whim, / Given that the goyim annoy ’im.” But the central mystery remains: God chose the Jews for what, exactly? After reading Jeremy Dauber’s Jewish Comedy: A Serious History, an excellent new survey of Jewish humor from the Old Testament through Adam Sandler, some might say that God chose the Jews to convey jokes, write sitcoms and comic movies, and publish novels peopled

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A Glass of Alsace

The sights and sweets of Strasbourg.
3:52 PM, Jan 28, 2018

Not everybody likes Alsatian wine. Good. That means more of it for me. The slim, green adolescent bottles with sloping shoulders and no hips are distinguished by pollen-yellow labels, often bearing medieval-style lettering. Something happens to grapes in this region of France that makes them taste exotic. Pinot Grigio in Italy is often forgettable. The same grape in Alsace can make wine that is as headily perfumed and waxy as a lily, vibrant with acidity that excites the palate without puckering the lips. Gewürztraminer smells of rose petals, nutmeg, and cardamom: a harem of flavors from the Arabian Nights. Muscat is the essence of grape, multiplied to the power of grape. These are mysterious wines, subtle as incense and candles

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The Counterinsurgent

The mixed legacy of Edward Lansdale.
9:08 PM, Jan 27, 2018

“You dirty son of a bitch.  .  . somebody’s got to beat you up and I hereby appoint myself.” Thus Edward Lansdale recalled addressing the CIA station chief in Saigon in the mid-1950s, when Lansdale was a CIA operative under cover of assistant air attaché at the American embassy. Whether or not his memory was exact—he recounted this anecdote in an interview three decades after the fact—the gist of the story is certainly correct: Lansdale was far from a natural fit in bureaucracies. He thrived only in informal settings, a trait that shaped his career and led to his contribution to American military history: as a pioneering practitioner of what are now known as

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Immortal Beloveds

In her new novel, Dara Horn takes the long view of longing.
4:26 AM, Jan 26, 2018

That death gives life meaning is a cliché, but it’s at least as plausible to say that it takes meaning away. Like the old joke about not wanting to know the ending of the movie Titanic in advance, everyone’s life heads toward the same destination, regardless of the road taken to get there. “After hundreds of years,” reflects Rachel, the immortal heroine of Eternal Life, “these details that most people spent their lives exploring were only details. Every man was finally just a man, then bones, then dust.” So why do anything at all, if it’s all going to end the same way?

Eternal Life isn’t Dara Horn’s first brush with death.

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'Post'-Truth

Steven Spielberg's new movie idealizes journalists by distorting the historical record
4:25 AM, Jan 26, 2018

The Post is about a little-known and relatively minor incident in the annals of newspapering—how the Washington Post made itself a player in the Pentagon Papers story, the biggest scoop of 1971, after it was beaten to the punch by the New York Times. And it merges that account with a female empowerment tale featuring the 55-year-old Katharine Graham as a shy and retiring victim of mansplaining back in 1971 who found her voice and her leadership skills standing up not only to Richard Nixon but to her own company’s condescending board of directors.

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Word-of-Mouth Movies

Audiences talked Jumanji and The Greatest Showman into box-office hits.
4:25 AM, Jan 19, 2018

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a “reboot,” whatever that means, of a 1995 Robin Williams movie about kids magically transported inside the world of a board game. Sony Studios knew that the new Jumanji was likely to be a hit from the reaction of preview audiences, but no one expected it would make about as much in its third and fourth weekends as it made in its first ($36 million). That almost never happens. And nobody thought it would make $350 million at the domestic box office—a milestone it will almost certainly reach and even exceed.

The Greatest Showman is an old-fashioned full-scale musical of the sort they stopped making in the 1960s (and for good reason), ostensibly about P. T. Barnum and the

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How Democracies Panic

We aren't verging on autocracy, we've just forgotten how to worry.
4:25 AM, Jan 19, 2018

We are living in an era of political panic. Some of President Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters in 2016 were motivated to overlook his shortcomings by desperate fear that our system of government was near death and only the most extreme measures could save it. A poll conducted by PRRI and the Atlantic immediately after the election found that more than 60 percent of Trump’s voters believed the 2016 election was “the last chance to stop America’s decline.” As one pro-Trump essayist famously put it, things had gotten so bad that it was time either to “charge the cockpit or you die.”

Since the election, similar fears of impending doom for our republic have overwhelmed some critics

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The Informed Patriot

Bruce Cole's case for the humanities in American life.
4:25 AM, Jan 19, 2018

It was a measure not only of his robust good health but the vitality of his public commitments that Bruce Cole’s sudden death last week came as such a shock to so many people—and that they were shocked to discover that he was 79. He seemed so much younger. Bruce had become one of the key figures in the cultural politics of our times and the most distinguished scholar ever to grace the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he served during most of the George W. Bush administration—making him the longest-serving chairman in the endowment’s history.

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Milton's Morality

Fallen man and the fallen stature of 'Paradise Lost.'
4:25 AM, Jan 19, 2018

In 2016, during the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Bard was feted by dozens of books, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, performances of his plays, lectures, and a Shakespeare Day gala attended by Prince Charles himself. The London Tube map replaced the names of its stops with titles of Shakespeare’s plays. Google, of course, did a doodle.

In 2017, it was all Jane Austen—the 200th anniversary of the novelist’s death. Like Shakespeare the year before, she was everywhere, not least in the pages of the New York Times, which ran some 20 articles on her, musing about everything from what she might tell us about Brexit to why the alt-right loves her so much.

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War by Other Memes

Falsehoods and feedback loops as social media change armed conflict.
4:25 AM, Jan 19, 2018

By any traditional standard, Israel won its 50-day war against Hamas in 2014. It incurred far fewer casualties than its Palestinian adversary. It rooted out much of the Gaza Strip’s terrorist infrastructure, including tunnels the militant group had burrowed to transport fighters into Israel. And it put an end to incessant rocket attacks on Israeli towns. So punishing was Israel’s military campaign, dubbed “Operation Protective Edge,” that Gazans were made to understand their continued support of Hamas would only bring more death and destruction.

Alas, according to David Patrikarakos, author of the fascinating War in 140 Characters, the traditional metrics of determining winners and losers no longer apply

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A Needless Quarrel

How an injustice from 1858 became unnecessarily divisive in 2018.
4:25 AM, Jan 19, 2018

It’s not every day that a quarrel breaks out among friends over something that happened in 1858. But so it was in the second week of January when First Things published online a review from its February issue of the memoirs of Edgardo Mortara, a man born into a Jewish family in Bologna in 1851 who died as a Catholic priest, Fr. Pio Maria Edgardo Mortara, in 1940. The memoirs, written in Spanish and dating from 1888, were never published until translated into Italian about a decade ago and have just been published in English.

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She's a Stand-Up Gal

The nostalgic marvels of Amazon's 'Mrs. Maisel.'
4:00 AM, Jan 12, 2018

The most potent form of nostalgia is for a time you never knew in a place you do and imagine was at its peak before you came along. For me, that would be the 1950s in New York City, set to the cool, light strain of the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” I can never get enough of the cultural examples of the day—made-on-location potboiler movies about career girls, dated bestselling novels about the advertising business that once occupied paperback racks next to the giant phone booths in every drugstore, the original cast albums of the great Broadway musicals.

It has ever been thus.

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Prodigies and Parenting

Extraordinary kids need more than just education.
4:00 AM, Jan 12, 2018

In a recent conversation with an administrator who spent years at one of Manhattan’s most prestigious prep schools, I brought up the subject of gifted education. “I don’t know what you mean,” she responded without a trace of irony. “Every child is gifted in his or her own way.” In a culture where every parent thinks he is raising a genius, teachers and principals (particularly those whose salaries depend on tuition dollars) have been taught never to say otherwise.

But for parents who really are raising geniuses, there seems to be little in the way of support or guidance.

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Justice and Sorrow

The will of the gods and the bloody lessonsof Herodotus' Histories.
4:00 AM, Jan 12, 2018

Writing history, and especially the history of the ancient world, is an uncertain business, in which the truth is as elusive as in metaphysics. Modern historians of the classical world necessarily rely heavily on the works of the ancients. And the supreme historians among the ancient Greeks had to rely on their own observations, the oral tradition, and the tales of any eyewitnesses they could find. The saying goes that journalism is the first draft of history; however, it was not mere journalists but the Greek master historians—Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon—who were the original men of the first draft. As the scholarly eminence Arnaldo Momigliano wrote tellingly, “There was no Herodotus before Herodotus.”

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Man of Letters

A visit with Hillel Halkin—scholar, novelist, Zionist.
1:55 PM, Jan 07, 2018

What is a snoop? In a review of one of his books, the Israeli writer, translator, and critic Hillel Halkin was called “one of the great snoops of the age.” In English, the word carries a negative connotation: A snoop is one who sticks his nose in others’ affairs, who pries. In Hebrew, the noun can be rendered as balash, a word that suggests a gumshoe, a detective. That somewhat more dignified Hebrew concept applies to Halkin. He has the snoop’s attitude and gimlet eye, a critic sizing up everything and everyone before him, including his readers.

Halkin and I recently met at a café, upscale by Israeli standards, in Zichron Ya’akov, the village in

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Face and Fame

Murillo's self-portraits and the vagaries of artistic reputation.
10:48 PM, Jan 05, 2018

In the sundry debates about the Western canon that periodically vex our culture, attention is always focused on those who have been excluded from it, with the implicit assumption that some malign force is behind that omission. Far less discussed but no less important is the question of who has fallen out—for the back end of the canon is every bit as changeful as the front. Who, for example, now reads Tasso or Lope de Vega or even Goethe? Yet a familiarity with their writings, acquired in the original language, was once part of the essential furniture of a cultivated mind.

In art as well, there was a time when Guido Reni and Claude Lorrain figured among the most famous painters in the world.

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From Party Hack to Reformer

Chester A. Arthur's surprising career.
10:04 PM, Jan 05, 2018

In 1878, Chester Alan Arthur held one of the most powerful and lucrative patronage positions in the federal government: collector of the Port of New York. Thanks to the percentage system by which he was paid, Arthur took in about $50,000 per year at a time when the president earned half as much. The corruption and political influence of Arthur’s office aroused indignation among good-government reformers, including President Rutherford B. Hayes, who fired Arthur and replaced him with someone devoted to the principles of merit selection for government offices. Arthur’s career looked to have passed its apogee, and his faction of pro-spoils-system Republicans appeared to be in permanent decline.

Three years later, Arthur

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The Anti-Bamboozler

H. L. Mencken's campaign against bluff and bunk.
4:00 AM, Jan 05, 2018

In a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, Henry Louis Mencken became not only one of America’s most memorable prose stylists, but also one of its most prolific ones.

Mencken (1880-1956) led many literary lives, often several at once. He began newspapering in his native Baltimore in 1899, quickly rising from a reporter to an editor and columnist. His bombastic commentaries for the Baltimore Sun gained attention far beyond his hometown, and his work for the Smart Set and the American Mercury affirmed his national profile as the dominant social critic of the 1920s. Mencken wrote about politics, music, drama, and literature, collecting his best essays in Prejudices, a series of six volumes that rests at the

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Prufrock: Bach's 250-Mile Walk, Westminster Abbey's 13th-Century Stained Glass, and the Largest Early Modern Map

Also: The biggest liar of French literature, and more.
11:30 AM, Jan 03, 2018

Reviews and News:

Happy New Year, everyone. 2017 wasn’t the greatest. There were a lot of bad movies (Sonny Bunch and Kyle Smith remind us of a few good ones), and politics was, well, politics. But not everything was terrible. An actual writer won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and there were some real gems in nonfiction trade. I didn’t read as much as I usually do, but my favorite nonfiction book was Andrzej Franaszek’s Czeslaw Milosz biography. Others that caught my eye: Vito Tanzi’s Termites of the State, Ulrich L Lehner’s God Is Not Nice, and Josephine Quinn’s In Search of the Phoenicians. The last book of 2017 in Columbia’s wonderful Russian Library series also looks worthwhile.

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Hans Keilson: Love in Hiding

What the novelist's wartime diaries reveal about his life and his writing.
4:00 AM, Dec 22, 2017

Hans Keilson was not quite 23 years old when, in December 1932, he came home from his hospital job to news from his mother. “Someone named Loerke called,” she said. “He called to congratulate us. He’s going to recommend your novel for publication.” The call had been from the poet Oskar Loerke, on whose recommendation Keilson’s debut, Life Goes On, was published in 1933 by the S. Fischer publishing house in Berlin.

Keilson’s novel was the last by a Jewish author that Fischer published before the Nazis rose to power. A year later, the book was banned in Germany.

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Pulling Together

An exceptional American on what makes America exceptional.
4:00 AM, Dec 22, 2017

I met Chris Gibson early in his first congressional race, at a campaign breakfast my family hosted at our house in upstate New York in April 2010. The sun was out that morning but winter was still in the air, as it often is there at that time of year. The fields and orchards of the Hudson River valley all around us had been the greatest food basket of the American Revolution. Now here was a man who stood before a little gathering of local farmers and small-business owners, perhaps 50 people in total, speaking to us of the founding.

Gibson grew up in Kinderhook, New York, the son of an oft-unemployed Irish Catholic union mechanic. As a teenager Gibson mopped floors in a diner and did odd jobs.

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Wintry Chills

Heart-stopping tales of specters and spooks.
4:00 AM, Dec 22, 2017

Is it perverse to find ghost stories relaxing, even restful? Compared with the grim realities of the news and the appalling horrors of the last hundred years, even such outstanding classics as M. R. James’s “Count Magnus,” Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar,” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener” come across as comparatively mild, almost cozy. Haunted houses and ancient family curses, as well as demons, revenants, and “dwellers on the threshold,” now seem like so much narrative furniture—and solid, Victorian furniture at that, guaranteeing comfort and security. In truth, older ghost stories remain so enjoyable at least partly because they are, quite simply,

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The Surprising History of 'O Holy Night'

Unconventional theology in the popular 'cantique de Noel'
4:00 AM, Dec 22, 2017

From time to time I’m forced to confront the ugly little corollary to my heart-leaping, car-singing, year-round love of Christmas music. Forced usually by Muzak, and more times than ought to be strictly necessary by enthusiastic choirs at midnight mass, I admit that there are Christmas songs that I really really do not like. You know what I mean; you must harbor at least one visceral reaction to a chestnut or a red nose or a star or that little percussionist from Hell.

Over the years, I’ve indulged unkind scorn for unfavorites, including, till just lately, “O Holy Night.

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Parenting with the Internet

The unexpected risks of lives spent online.
4:00 AM, Dec 22, 2017

'Start at the apocalypse and work back.” That’s how Mary Aiken describes her approach to her role as a forensic cyberpsychologist—an expert in digital behavior and crime. “My job, as I see it, is to be fully armed with real insights and information, both open-eyed and imaginative, about potential risks so I can be prepared for the worst-case scenario.” And so that she can prepare us, as parents, for it. In her book The Cyber Effect, recently released in paperback, Aiken pulls no punches, explaining, “The variety of unsupervised and age-inappropriate content to explore online is almost limitless. And the number of children exposed to it grows every hour.”

If those sentences make your

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'The Last Jedi': The Bore is Strong with This One

The latest Star Wars flick and the state of movie criticism.
4:00 AM, Dec 22, 2017

Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot.

Yes! I hear you fans saying. Yes! He gets it! But a few of you (whichever ones of you follow me on Twitter) may be confused: Wait, wasn’t Podhoretz ragging on The Last Jedi all weekend? Yes, I was. The fact is I didn’t write the sentences above just now. I wrote them in the New York Post 18 years ago, in 1999, upon the release of The Phantom Menace, the first Star Wars movie made since the original trilogy.

Which is to say, I was once like you

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Devil's Ball

Fifty years of 'The Master and Margarita,' the Russian masterpiece of magical realism.
8:11 PM, Dec 16, 2017

Nearly half a century ago, when I was a preschooler in Soviet-era Moscow, two thick magazines appeared in our home. They had plain, pale-tan covers, but I could tell they were quite special to my parents. In those magazines’ pages was a riveting story—what I could understand from my precocious attempts at reading it at the age of 5 or 6. Years later, when I read it properly, some things still lived on in my memory: a huge, talking black cat that walks on its hind legs; a lady who becomes a witch and flies naked on a broomstick; a magician’s globe that could come alive and zoom in on a single matchbox-sized house with minuscule human figures inside.

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Jane Austen: The Political

Did she hide radical messages in her books?
8:04 PM, Dec 16, 2017
In December 1943, Winston Churchill contracted pneumonia on a visit to North Africa and found himself banned from work and laid up in bed. While convalescing, he asked his daughter Sarah to read him Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It proved just the tonic. “What calm lives they had, those people!” he later wrote. “No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.” Read more

Rock-and-Roll Editor

How 'Rolling Stone' and its founder Jann Wenner went from counterculture to establishment.
4:22 PM, Dec 16, 2017

Joe Hagan has written what promises to be the standard biography of Jann Wenner—standard, because it’s hard to imagine anyone working up the energy to take another stab at it. Fifty years ago, at the age of 21, Wenner founded Rolling Stone magazine, and he’s been editor in chief ever since. Thanks to the anniversary, he has lately been much in the news. Not only has Hagan’s very long biography appeared, but so has a coffee-table book, 50 Years of Rolling Stone, a slab of self-congratulation recounting the magazine’s most celebrated articles and writers, with a not-humble introduction by Wenner. He has made the rounds on the chat shows, morning and evening.

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