More than four decades have passed since readers made the acquaintance of a figure who has assumed an almost mythological role in the stories that are sometimes told about the way we live now. This was the bricoleur, introduced into the cultural conversation by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the opening pages of The Savage Mind at the high tide of structuralism in the early 1960s. The bricoleur is, simply, a kind of handyman. Unlike the carpenter or the electrician, he has no particular set of tools or domain of expertise. He can perform any number of tasks, but his knack is

A last gasp of sorts—or maybe a sputter—The Devil Gets His Due collects fifty years’ worth of criticism from that other rebellious Jewish literary son of Newark, Leslie Fiedler. Once the bad boy of cultural crit, Fiedler today seems quaint, which isn’t exactly his fault. By now, everybody—or at least everybody acquainted with cultural studies—knows what was really going on between Ishmael and Queequeg, but Fiedler was there first in 1948, when he argued for the centrality of the homoerotic male bond and the “dark skinned beloved” to American literature in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”

Soccer’s global appeal has few analogues. The “world” in World Cup is a much larger place than, say, the one in World Series: Some seven hundred million people are reported to have watched the tournament’s final game in 2006, and the roster of fifa’s member nations is a virtual facsimile of the UN’s. In The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, David Goldblatt argues that the sport has become “our collective metaphor,” one that “expresses the Faustian bargain that all modern societies have made with the forces of money and power.” His book provides a scrupulous account of

The American West is a region of subtle, folksy flavors, each state characterized by an externally reinforced image: Colorado radiates an aura of upscale hippie crunch, Texas struts strike-it-big bling, Utah dazzles under the long shadow of Mormonism (and Sundance), and New Mexico pipes out a pleasing desert spirituality.

A personal aside: When Colin De Land died in 2003 at age forty-seven, Artforum titled its tribute to him “Shaggy Dogg.” It was one of the most apt titles the magazine ever came up with. First at Vox Populi, the East Village gallery he opened in the early ’80s on East Sixth Street, then at […]

It’s hard not to wonder whether anyone back in the mid-1980s—when Don DeLillo was busy crafting White Noise’s Jack Gladney, the wily chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill—could have anticipated that an entire book on the subject of the Hitler salute would someday be published. And yet even a casual visit to the book exhibition at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association, where a small army of swastikas can be found goose-stepping across dust jackets as if choreographed for Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler,” would have suggested that it was far from unimaginable. Indeed, the natural counterpart

Michael Angarano as Arthur Parkinson and Olivia Thirlby as Lila Raybern in Snow Angels, directed by David Gordon Green, 2008 DAVID GORDON GREEN’S haunting and melancholy drama Snow Angels stands alongside his earlier George Washington (2000) and All the Real Girls (2003) as yet another of the young director’s very personal, uniquely big-hearted portraits of […]

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, an extraordinary photo came to light. Taken in 1971, it’s a holiday snapshot showing the Saudi bin Laden family on vacation in Sweden. There they are, twenty-two of them, with a healthy complement of brothers and sisters ranging from toddlers to tweens to twenty-somethings, posing in front of a big pink car, grinning and laughing, resplendent in crazy-patterned bell-bottoms and loud shirts. How could this family, looking so characteristic of its ’70s heyday—so Westernized, so likable, so much like us—have spawned the most virulent anti-American terrorist on earth?

Boris Groys has been working in the gap between art and philosophy for more than thirty years. Born in East Berlin in 1947, educated in the Soviet Union, and active as a critic in Moscow’s underground art scene in the ’70s, he emigrated to West Germany in 1981, eventually receiving a doctorate in philosophy. In recent years, he has lectured on art, literature, media theory, and philosophy at New York University and the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, while pursuing an increasing number of curatorial and art projects. Well known in eastern and central Europe, his books

As we were saying, the New York School can be described and redescribed through the coteries that it comprised—this, at least, seems to be the working assumption of recent books on the subject. In its day, the currency of the New York School was gossip; now we read of cliques, of an expanded field, of mutable social frames, or, as in Maggie Nelson’s account, of gender. Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions is the promising title of a caprice that moves restlessly among these key terms while acknowledging the contributions made by the women poets whose work