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In his celebrated essay, 'Defining Deviancy Down' (American Scholar, Winter, 1993), Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm against passivity in the face of barbarization. He particularly deplored the nonchalance of [...]

Easily the most pleasurable and interesting book I have read this year has been Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Vintage, $13, 391 pp.), an extraordinarily beautiful, sexy, [...]

For reasons too complicated to go into here, I recently found myself subscribed--for the first time since 1964, my first year as a graduate student at Yale--to PMLA. That's Publications […]

Harold Bloom Riverhead Books, $35, 768 pp. Frank McConnell I have to begin by acknowledging that Harold Bloom has been, for almost forty years, a major presence in my life. [...]

If 'Media Studies' has a father or a godfather, it's surely H. Marshall McLuhan (1911-80). Not that he invented the field: Plato, I think, did that in his distinction between [...]

Sister Wendy on PBS I have to be honest. I'm a good teacher. No: I'm a really good teacher. But when I started showing my wife the tapes of 'Sister [...]

I've never been any good at keeping secrets. So: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon is not only the most stunning novel I've read in the last twenty years, but one [...]

Last October, VH 1, which is basically MTV for people with intelligences higher than that of a breath mint, ran a full day of clips--including live performances not previously shown [...]

Let us now praise the Fox Network. TV, as its most Cromwellian critics never tire to tell us, is debased, popular entertainment out to make the fastest possible buck by [...]

I've been trying for some time now to understand why 'Northern Exposure' is my cherished favorite of everything on the Tube these days. And, as it begins its new season, [...]

Every spring, the nation's big advertising firms get together and have a ceremony where they hand out awards for the best radio and television commercials for that year: they're called [...]

SHAKESPEARE AND THE GODDESS OF COMPLETE BEING Ted Hughes Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35, 464 pp. Reading Ted Hughes's grand, maddening, and finally un-put-downable book on Shakespeare, I kept thinking [...]

Chris Carter's `Millennium' As I write, we are coming to the end of the 1996-97 TV season in which the most arresting new series was 'Millennium,' on the Fox Network. [...]

Lucas's Star Wars' This year's first Big Cultural Event began twenty years ago. I'm talking, of course, about the release of the Star Wars trilogy, re-released earlier this year to [...]

I've been trying to remember a time when Gerry Mulligan--somewhere, somehow--wasn't on my mind, and I can't think of many. Mulligan died on January 20 at the age of sixty-eight. […]

Theodore Sturgeon was one of the truly fine writers of science fiction, and at a s-f convention in the late fifties - well before the genre became academically respectable - [...]

'Reflections on Vatican II' Near the end of the two-hour documentary, 'Reflections on Vatican II' - which airs on PBS on September 18 and which is splendid - George Weigel, [...]

As one who tries to stay away from, as far as possible, Nature in all her sublime but intrusive manifestations, I always look forward to summer as the season when [...]

As one who tries to stay away from, as far as possible, Nature in all her sublime but intrusive manifestations, I always look forward to summer as the season when [...]

As one who tries to stay away from, as far as possible, Nature in all her sublime but intrusive manifestations, I always look forward to summer as the season when [...]

As one who tries to stay away from, as far as possible, Nature in all her sublime but intrusive manifestations, I always look forward to summer as the season when [...]

As one who tries to stay away from, as far as possible, Nature in all her sublime but intrusive manifestations, I always look forward to summer as the season when [...]

Seinfeld as Sartre So, what did you think about the last episode of 'Seinfeld?' I asked my class on the morning of May 15. 'It sucked,' said a girl in [...]

In the midseventies, there was a brilliant TV commercial for some alcoholism treatment center, which I remember as 'The Elephant in the Living Room.' Here's the gag. We see an [...]

Millennial fever is upon us, and it's pandemic. Never mind that Clio, the Muse of history, doesn't really pay much mind to our highly arbitrary calendrical reckonings. We want her [...]

In the premiere episode of ABC's 'Nothing Sacred' (Thursdays at 8:00 P.M., Eastern), a younger priest and an older one are discussing the difficulties of living a life of faith. [...]