The New Criterion
(Mobile Version)

February 2002 Volume 20, Number 6  

Notes & Comments

Harvard’s black comedy
On Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, Black Studies & Cornel West.

Repealing history
On the controversy regarding the proposed statue to commemorate the firemen killed on September 11.


Features

The slyer virus: the West's anti-westernism
by Mark Steyn
The sixth in a series titled “The survival of culture.”

George Santayana
by Roger Kimball
On the philosopher, occasioned by the publication of The Letters of George Santayana.

Guerrillophilia & the sincerely frivolous
by Anthony Daniels
On Senior Service: A Story of Riches, Revolution & Violent Death, by Carlo Feltrinelli.


Poems

Separating the flowers
by Laurie Lamon

France
by Dick Allen

Black Skimmers on the Gulf Coast
by Wilmer Mills


Theater

Goin’ to Afghanistan
by Mark Steyn
On Homebody/Kabul, by Tony Kushner.


Art

Paris in winter: thank heaven for Morandi
by Karen Wilkin
Giorgio Morandi at the Musée D'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Exhibition note
by Daniel Kunitz
Daniel Kunitz on “Inheriting Cubism: The Impact of Cubism on American Art,” at Hollis Taggert Galleries & Shahzia Sikander in “Conversations with Traditions” at Asia Society.


Music

New York chronicle
by Jay Nordlinger
On Valery Gergiev & the Kirov Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Hansel und Gretel, by Humperdinck & Don Carlo, by Verdi at the Met, Vespers, by Rachmaninoff at Park Avenue’s Church of St. Ignatius Loyala & the New York Philharmonic playing Valses nobles et sentimentales, by Ravel, Dances of Galánta, by Kodály & Strauss’s Rosenkavalier Suite.

Opera in New York
by Patrick J. Smith
On performances at the Manhattan School of Music, the recent revivals of Die Meistersinger & Arabella & Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Met.


The Media

The charges & countercharges of self-righteous prigs
by James Bowman
On Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes how the Media Distorts the News, by Bernard Goldberg.


Books

Orpheus with arsenic
by Eric Ormsby
A review of François Villon’s The Legacy & The Testament, translated by Louis Simpson.

Be brave
by Jeffrey Meyers
A review of Iris Murdoch: a life, by Peter Conradi.

Spheres and cubes
by James Franklin
A review of Mathematical Mountaintops, by John L. Casti.

Life in Yiddishland
by Sanford Pinsker
A review of Yiddish: A Nation of Words, by Miriam Weinstein.


Notebook

Which God has failed
by Paul Hollander
On the tenacity of leftist ideology.