In the opening pages of Pity the Billionaire, Thomas Frank sounds like he’s reporting on the protests against Wall Street during the fall of 2011. He describes the uproar that spread through the country in the years after a stock-market bubble burst in America’s face, a moment in which unemployment is high and the middle class is demoralized.“Markets disintegrate, layoffs mount, foreclosures begin, and before you know it,” Frank writes, “the people are in the streets, yelling for blood.” But this early scene in Frank’s latest book isn’t a record of the months-long unrest of the various

I first heard of Patti Smith in 1971, when I was seventeen. The occasion was an unsigned half-column item in the New York Flyer, a short-lived local supplement to Rolling Stone, marking the single performance of Cowboy Mouth, a play she cowrote and costarred in with Sam Shepard, and it was possibly her first appearance in the press. What caught my eye and made me save the clipping—besides the accompanying photo of her in a striped jersey, looking vulnerable—was her boast, “I’m one of the best poets in rock and roll.” At the time, I didn’t just think I was the best poet in rock and roll; I

The accusation that Jews are a backwards, self-isolating tribe is one of the oldest tropes in the history of anti-Semitism. The idea goes back to Hellenistic times, wends its way through centuries European Christendom, and now sneaks into contemporary debates about Israel. Ancient Greek historian Hecataeus of Abdera, characterized Judaism as “a misanthropic and inhospitable way of life,” and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, writes that “no group is more ethnocentric and more organized for their perceived interests than are Jews.” But vile as such pronouncements are, Orthodox Jewish

The title of Arthur Miller’s first book, Situation Normal (1944), alluded to a well-known saying in the army—Situation Normal: All Fucked Up (SNAFU)—but it might be applied more widely to Miller’s view of American life in general and American family life in particular. It’s true that Philip Larkin used the same vocabulary to describe English families—“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”—but Miller saw tragedy, not just humor, in the postwar American scene. Perhaps no major writer understood better than Miller why America could not be one happy family. In his plays of the late 1940s and early

Two paramedics, a man and a woman wearing green and blue scrubs, toss biscotti to seagulls. They glance out at the open ocean. Behind them, at the old port, their empty ambulance waits. A lone jogger, wearing a sweaty knee brace, runs around the parking lot. He, too, keeps his eyes on the Mediterranean Sea. Although he looks like a tourist, he’s probably a policeman.

The island of Lampedusa is overrun with law enforcement types and immigration agents. Along with relief workers and journalists, leery policemen fill the tourist hotels, restaurants, and beaches. The town is a town of well-muscled