The real culture war in 1980s America was waged by young people who were trying to create their own culture and jealously rejected corporate culture along the way.
Books
Book Review: “Mona” — No Prisoners Taken
It isn’t always easy being beautiful, brainy, and talented.
Pop Culture Commentary: The Rise of the “Boomer Doomer”
Hippie Boomers have morphed from being figures we were horrified to see victimized (think “Easy Rider”) to the kind of people that audiences are positively happy to see get their comeuppances.
Author Interview: Talking to Jamal Greene about How Our Demand for Rights Went So Wrong
“‘Rightsism’ gives judges much more power than they deserve in a democracy,” Jamal Greene writes. “When U.S. judges face a conflict of rights, they cancel one right or the other.”
Arts Remembrance: Poet and Illustrator Joan Walsh Anglund
Throughout her career, Joan Walsh Anglund remained humbled and amazed by her success, maintaining a quiet and private life.
Book Review: “One Left” — The Silence of Enslaved Women
This Korean novel dramatizes, with indelible force, the utter dehumanization of women confined to authoritarian patriarchal imprisonment.
Book Review: “This Is Not My Memoir” — André Gregory’s Rich, Plentiful, and Complicated Life
I have only one criticism of André Gregory’s fabulously entertaining book: I wish it was twice as long, or even three times its 208 pages.
Book Review: “Acts of Desperation” — The Ordinary Flip-Flops of Desire
This debut novel concentrates on the vagaries of desire, but in a spare, uncomplicated, and natural fashion that sets it apart from any formulaic romance.
Book Review: “Mike Nichols: A Life” — Portrait of a Protean Artist
This nearly 600-page text is a closely detailed, comprehensive portrait by a biographer riveted, as many of us are, by his charismatic subject.
Literary Remembrance: Lawrence Ferlinghetti — The Modest Beat
Ferlinghetti was a truly Whitman-like figure who really had been through it all, traveled the world, and fought for what he believed in. I have yet to hear anyone say an unkind word said about him.