Artists are in the business of simultaneously de-familiarizing and re-familiarizing us with the world around us. "Habit is a great deadener," Samuel Beckett explained, and art lends us a new pair of spectacles with which to view reality anew.

Reading writer and actor Wallace Shawn's "Essays," a hodgepodge of short pieces on war, theater, sex, art and privileged guilt, with interviews of Noam Chomsky and poet Mark Strand thrown into the mix, I was reminded of this essential function of creative dreamers, be they playwrights, composers or painters. All, ultimately, are anthropologists of alien

The neoconservative polemicist Norman Podhoretz has chosen an odd time to urge Jews to become Republicans on the grounds that they’re endangered most by the left and their own liberalism. He acknowledges that 78 percent of Jews voted for Obama, but not that Jewish neocons such as Ed Koch and David Brooks defected from the GOP as the populism they’d tried to rouse and channel took a sinister turn. Worse, old-line conservatives, like the late William F. Buckley Jr., have muttered that neocons are conservatism’s misfortune. To update neocon elder Irving Kristol’s quip, today a liberal may be a

The fall of Bataan on April 9, 1942, remains the single largest surrender of United States military forces in history, with roughly seventy-six thousand soldiers (most of them Filipino allies) handed over to Japanese captors. Japan’s attack on America’s Clark Air Base in the Philippines destroyed an entire airfield of unprotected planes and unprepared men. While the Pearl Harbor attack of four months earlier is universally acknowledged as a watershed moment of US involvement in the Pacific theater, Bataan, with its less heroic mix of humiliation at the hands of the enemy and betrayal by those

We live in a culture devoted to technology, and yet most of us cannot find the time to consider its history or its consequences. John Freeman has made the time, and he has thought carefully about how we have gotten here. The average office worker sends and receives some two hundred e-mails a day. Sixty-five percent of Americans spend more time with a computer than with a spouse. Our minds are frequently distracted by a buzz, beep, or blink of light from a handheld device. Our eyesight is getting poorer and our attention spans shorter. But in The Tyranny of E-mail, Freeman takes pains to point

Current economic and social conditions—growing income disparity, battles over immigration, corporate titans’ sway over political affairs—have led many contemporary critics to point out correspondences between the United States of the past two decades and the nation of the late nineteenth century’s Gilded Age. For optimists pursuing a similar analogy, the recent election of a community organizer as president, his push for health-care reform, and this summer’s minimum-wage hike recall the Progressive response to Gilded Age industrial capitalism. Cecelia Tichi trenchantly summarizes such comparisons