Farewell to College Station

Earlier today, after twenty years on campus, I taught my last two classes at Texas A&M University. My emotions are mixed. Much of the ba...

Return to the authors

It is perhaps appropriate to be questioning the authority of Michel Fou­cault, who famously held that, if the author is not exactly dead, a...

Foucault is #1

Michel Foucault was the authority most often cited in scholarship published in the humanities during the year 2007, according to Thomson Re...

Five Books of Israel

This evening the State of Israel, the reshit tsmiḥat g’ulateynu , will cele­brate its sixty-second anniversary. Although some readers of thi...

More, please—faster, please

A few days ago, Mark Athitakis replied to a piece on the Newsweek website, which complained that “the Library of America is running out o...

Ideas and motives

Yesterday, over at Contentions , John Podhoretz attacked David P. Gold­man for writing this last Friday on a First Things blog: Obama is t...

12-day-late April Fool’s joke

The Pulitzer Prize in fiction has been awarded , if that is the right word, to Paul Harding’s Tinkers (“a powerful celebration of life,” in...

Holocaust memory

Yesterday was Yom Hashoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day. On the Jewish calendar it falls between Passover—which despite President Obama’s con...

The exact day

Last year I offered a “small contribution to the correction of literary history.” I pointed out that the “good fight” which opens the ninth...

Passover is over

Apologies to everyone who commented during the last two days of the festival, which are days of rest among the Orthodox. At least I was able...

The cultural Left, the paper Left

Although I have long held that professors in the humanities and social sciences are overwhelmingly Leftist because utopian visions mirror t...

Brophy on experiment

Brigid Brophy (1929–1995) is nearly forgotten today, except by those who wish to claim her for a special-interest subliterature that it wou...