In 1954 when the blockbuster horror movie Them hit the silver screen the young Barnard graduate and budding writer Francine du Plessix not yet married to the artist Cleve Gray was off in France Even if she hadn rsquo t been there was no way such a sophisticated intellectual with flawless Fre

The first question that comes to my mind while reading de Bellaigue rsquo s blunt reportage from the Islamic Republic is What about Kahra Kazemi the photo-journalist who was brutally beaten and possibly raped by the Iranian secret police before dying of her injuries on July 10 2003 She held a

India has turned into something like the center of the world Forever touted as the world rsquo s largest democracy it is now about to become the world rsquo s most populous country The achievements of its scientists artists and writers many of them migr s are astonishing The thoroughly mod

The ultra right may have the loudest talking heads these days Limbaugh O rsquo Reilly Hannity etc but the left has cornered the market on stylish witty substantial writers Lewis Lapham Frank Rich Maureen Dowd Hendrik Hertzberg and others None of the leftist gang are likely to become

There rsquo s a well-worn Yiddish story about a yeshiva bokher seminarian who defiantly informs his old rabbi that he has become an apikoyres unbeliever And how long have you studied asks the rabbi suspiciously For five years replies the young apostate Ha snorts the rabbi five yearsand he

The trouble with philosophers is that they think ideas are everything The trouble with Jungian psychologists is that they think timeless archetypes shape all human behavior James Hillman is both a philosopher and a Jungian psychologist and he is vulnerable to both charges but in this rambling r

The insufferable anonymous narrator of Notes From Underground 1864 is the first great example of Dostoyevsky rsquo s genius for creating paradoxical witnesses to Christianitytwisted truth-telling unbelievers like Svidrigaylov in Crime and Punishment Ippolit in The Idiot Shatov in The Possessed

How could the world get along without nostalgia Well until 1688 it had to do without that word because it hadn rsquo t been invented until the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer simply translated the humble German Heimweh ldquo homesickness rdquo or literally ldquo home-pain rdquo into Greek

George Santayana should have warned us those who can remember the past but do so obsessively are just as condemned to repeat it as those who forget The 1999 Nobel laureate G nter Grass has been prophetically attacking and mourning the horrors of 20th-century German history since the publication

The vagaries of Arthur Schnitzler rsquo s reputation in the English-speaking world have been curious Often praised but little read best known for filmed versions of his work from Max Ophuls rsquo s marvelous ldquo La Ronde rdquo 1950 to Stanley Kubrick rsquo s dreadful ldquo Eyes Wide Shut r