The New Criterion
(Mobile Version)

January 2003 Volume 21, Number 5  

Notes & Comments

Brave new world watch
On gender-benders and the latest front in identity politics.

Stuck in the 1960s
On the "Borking" of Henry Kissinger.

Annals of transgression
On the case of a suicide mistaken for performance art.


Features

Why the West?
by Roger Kimball
Upon the publication of Roger Scruton's The West and the Rest.

Eric Hobsbawm: lying to the credulous
by David Pryce-Jones
Considering Hossbawm’s new book Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life.

The irrepressible Pepys
by Brooke Allen
Considering Pepys, upon the publication of Claire Tomalin's new book Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.

Lionel Trilling & the crisis at Columbia
by Jeffrey Meyers
Drawing from an unpublished, May 1968, interview with Trilling.


Poems

In the guesthouse
by Mary Jo Salter


Theater

Running on empty
by Mark Steyn
On Caryl Churchill's Far Away & Our Town.


Art

Late Style Anthony Caro
by Karen Wilkin


Music

New York chronicle
by Jay Nordlinger
On Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Maxim Vengerov, Hilary Hahn, Alicia de Larrocha and the Tokyo String Quartet & the Met's Aida.


The Media

“Media bias” revisited
by James Bowman
On institutional claims of unbiased reporting of the Augusta Nationals.


Books

Who reads Mencken now?
by Hilton Kramer
A review of The Skeptic: A Life Of H. L. Mencken, by Terry Teachout.

The prophets today
by Hadley Arkes
A review of The Prophets, by Norman Podhoretz.

Whispered disclosures
by Eric Ormsby
A review of Complete poems, by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Walter Martin.

Love and error
by Gerald J. Russello
A review of Ovid: The Poet and His Work, by Niklas Holzberg.

Big science
by James Franklin
A review of A New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram

Master taxonomist
by Guy Davenport
A review of Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist, by Wilfrid Blunt


Notebook

Ivan Illich, 1926-2002
by Anthony Daniels