Features

The avalanche of publicity for Hannibal has made it the most widely anticipated film of the season. Small wonder: Only the bravest of moviemakers would dare to carry on the story of Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, told with such stunning effect 10 years ago in Silence of the Lambs. That these stories are meant […]

In Charlotte Salomon’s extraordinary Life? or Theater? A Play withMusic–a kind of unbound epic, composed of more than 700 watercolor panels plus text and suggestions for accompanying music–the painted curtains rise on Berlin, 1913. A young woman, named Charlotte, is floating blue-faced in her coffin. She has drowned herself. This exhibit, which features about half […]

Experiencing Politics: A Legislator’s Stories of Government andHealth Care, by John E. McDonough. University of California Press, 342 pages, $19.95. Toward the end of this useful handbook on the politics of lawmaking,the author laments the dearth of novels and films about what really goeson inside legislatures. After all, it is through popular art that thebroad […]

The Next Deal: The Future of Public Life in the Information Age, by Andrei Cherny. Basic Books, 268 pages, $24.00. John Stuart Mill, in his essay on Coleridge, remarks that “a knowledge of thespeculative opinions of men between twenty and thirty years of age is the greatsource of political prophecy.” If Mill is right, then […]

White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America, Jill Andresky Fraser. W.W. Norton and Company, 278 pages, $26.95. While working through the 1980s and 1990s as a financial journalist, JillAndresky Fraser was bothered by an apparent paradox: She observed the “buoyantoptimism” of corporate executives and business boosters enjoying a rising stockmarket […]

The Oblongs, the WB network’s new animated series that premiered on April Fools’ Day, opens with the sound of a flushing toilet. Chipper voices, who could be singing about the Flintstones or Scooby Doo, sing the show’s setup: As cartoon waste flows from a fancy mansion down into a valley filled with decrepit houses and […]

American schools are said to be failing. Like nineteenth-century medicine men, everybody is promoting everything, whether there is any evidence that it works or not. Over here we have vouchers, charters, privatization, longer school days, summer school, and merit pay. Over there we have the frequent testing of students, the testing of teachers, smaller class […]

University of California President Richard C. Atkinson’s loud call in February for abolishing the use of the SAT I test in undergraduate admissions is likely to have a lot more significance outside the UC system than within. Atkinson’s university has already spent the last four years quietly butsystematically de-emphasizing the test (originally called the Scholastic […]

Academic Instincts, by Marjorie Garber. Princeton University Press, 187 pages, $19.95. Why do the French hate the Belgians and vice versa? For the same reason that Yale students emblazon shirts with “Harvard Sucks”: We define ourselves by the distance from near relations. Freud calls this the narcissism of minor differences. In Academic Instincts, a collection […]

Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture, by Andrew Hurley. Basic Books, 409 pages, $27.50. The lunch counter in my college town is called the Yankee Doodle, and its best moments come just after the 6:00 a.m. opening. Late-night partiers straggle in before bed, thesis writers on […]