Features

One of the most accomplished and moving American films of recent years is David Riker’s The City (La Ciudad), the recipient of many international film festival awards. It was shot over a period of six years, and depicts the everyday struggles of Central American and Mexican immigrants in New York. Its emotional integrity, stunning black-and-white […]

Living in New Jersey is always strange, but it’s been getting stranger since HBO’s hit series The Sopranos debuted last year. Suddenly the whole state is rediscovering its Mafia roots. At my local mall, the hairdresser can’t even wait until the conditioner to tell me that he is related to one of the original five […]

One way or the other, everybody was up in arms about “Sensation,” the exhibition of “Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” that recently closed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Details of that show and the outraged objections to it were reported in the media with a relentlessness usually reserved for airline disasters. But […]

In the summer of 1998, after about a year of peddling its Oyster Creek nuclear plant and finding no takers, GPU Inc. appeared resigned to shutting the unit down. Aging, inefficient, and economically uncompetitive, Oyster Creek was a prime example of how nuclear power–the ultimate energy boondoggle–wouldn’t survive in the new world of deregulated energy […]

Jazz rode the 1990s surprisingly well. It was a decade in which the recorded-music market was flat compared to other media; and traditionally, jazz–which has a perennial single-digit market share–is an early casualty of the budget cuts and corporate take-overs that market slumps spawn. But that didn’t happen in the 1990s. Moreover, jazz benefited from […]

Not long ago I saw a documentary film on Adolf Eichmann and was shocked by the sight of him: The smirk, the smile, seemed to yank his mouth nearly off his face. He looked like a boxer undergoing the impact of a right hook, or like a portrait by, of all people, Soutine, in which […]

Bill Clinton has presided over the longest period of economic expansion in American history–whether by design or default, whether by strategic appointments to critical government agencies or by caving in to the private sector, whether by fine-tuning fiscal policy or by getting out of the way. During the years of the Clinton administration, the U.S. […]

Six months before Robert F. Kennedy was killed, I had occasion to inventory the theories of what made him tick. Here is my list: that he was a ruthless calculator (Ralph De Toledano, Gore Vidal, Victor Lasky); that he was a market researcher (Nicholas Thimmesch, William Johnson); that he was his father’s son (Richard Whelan); […]

For years infamous as the world’s biggest garbage dump (and quite possibly the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa), New Jersey’s Meadowlands is once again home to burgeoning populations of wildlife. Eco-tourists now flock to this 32-square-mile tidal and freshwater estuary, located just five miles west of New York City. But the fate of the […]

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, by James W. Loewen. The New Press, 480 pages, $26.95. In Lies Across America, James Loewen offers 100 short essays, each one discussing an individual monument or historic site and the inaccuracies in its portrayal of the past. He criticizes the way the birthplace of Helen […]