The New Criterion
(Mobile Version)

January 2004 Volume 22, Number 5  

Notes & Comments

Life at the MLA

Another judicial outrage

The media and Iraq

Speaking of Saddam...


Features

Expensive illiterates: victimhood & education
by Mark Steyn
On the pitfalls of the American educational system. The fifth of our series “Lengthened shadows: America and Its Institutions in the Twenty-first Century.”

Leibniz & Job: The metaphysics of evil & the experience of evil
by Leszek Kolakowski

Booker vs. Goncourt; or, when silence is a duty
by Anthony Daniels
Considering two literary prizes & the different ways in which they were undeserveded.

Are emotions moral?
by Frank Buckley
On the influence of emotion on moral decision making.


Poems

The ghost
by William Logan

The death of Ovid
by William Logan

Zero hour
by William Logan

Three phases of culture
by William Logan


Art

Sculpture in Dallas
by Karen Wilkin
On the opening of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and its opening exhibition “From Rodin to Calder: Masterworks of Modern Sculpture from the Nasher Collection.”

Strange fruit
by James Panero
On the “John Currin” exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art and “Kiki Smith: Prints, Books and Things” at the Museum of Modern Art, Queens.


Music

New York chronicle
by Jay Nordlinger
On performances by Salvatore Licitra, Aprile Millo, and Stephanie Blythe at the annual concert of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation. Two conductors and pianists at the New York Philharmonic and a few Christmas programs.


The Media

The Mountains of Instead
by James Bowman
On the media's pointless obsession with what should have been.


Books

The achievement of Robert Lowell
by Richard Tillinghast
A review of Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.

Message from the gods
by Richard Garner
A review of Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths, by Mary Lefkowitz.

The disaster parade
by Eric Ormsby
A review of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, by Blake Bailey.

The Steiner school
by Paul Dean
A review of Lessons of the Masters, by George Steiner.

Evocations
by Herbert London
A review of Tributes: Personal Reflections on a Century of Social Research, by Irving Louis Horowitz.


Notebook

Hugh Kenner, 1923-2003
by Guy Davenport
Hugh Kenner's life of literary criticism.