Bruce Bawer
How bizarre it was to watch Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, being abused at his confirmation hearing by the Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Until Trump picked him for his cabinet, I didn’t…
At CNN, the biggest annual tradition is its several-hours-long New Year’s Eve celebration. It used to star prime-time news anchor Anderson Cooper and one of his bosom buddies, comedienne Kathy Griffin, whose schtick mainly involved saying and doing supposedly outrageous…
Critic, schmitic. How can you pretend to be engaged in objective aesthetic appraisal when you’re talking about movies that you first watched decades ago in your childhood living room, while your late mother was trimming the tree and your long-dead…
Didion & Babitz By Lili Anolik (Scribner, 352 pages, $30) When I saw that a new book was out entitled Didion & Babitz, my first reaction was to ask: “Who the hell is Babitz?” My second reaction was to buy…
I first encountered Nikki Giovanni, who died on Monday at the age of 81, in the pages of the 1973 edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. It was the mid-1970s, and I was an undergraduate English major, and…
The prescription painkiller OxyContin was released by Purdue Pharma in 1995; the six-part TV series Painkiller, created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster and directed by Peter Berg, was released by Netflix in 2023. During the intervening 28 years, Purdue’s…
When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, almost everybody was familiar with the prime-time schedules of the major networks. In those long-ago days before cable TV, the Internet, home video recording, and DVDs, broadcast TV was the…
The recent death of Sandra M. Gilbert at the age of 87 sent my mind reeling back decades to the first time I came across her name. With Susan Gubar (who still lives), Gilbert wrote The Madwoman in the Attic:…
Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry By Dana Gioia (Paul Dry Books, 198 pages, $20) “People’s reaction to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic. They either love it or they hate it. If they love…
