Articles Written By Robert Birnbaum
Robert Birnbaum is editor-at-large at Identity Theory. All the sketchy details of his life will be (re)fabricated in his memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Do Things With Words. His weblog can be found here.
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Apropos of Nothing
What You Don’t Know About Male Brains
No surprise that we live in a world full of junk science, unhelpful self-help, and freakish social sciences—which makes culling the valuable from the vapid somewhat perilous. Not that...
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Current Reads
What Is It Good For?
In spite of a conscientious indifference in the more reactionary and confused quarters of the American polity, that pesky Vietnam thing still lingers in the ether, foreshadowing and resonating and...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
When I’m 64
As it is a birthday of sorts (there is a story here, but you will have to wait for the publication of my memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Have Fun...
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New Finds
Hors d’Oeuvres With Wittgenstein
Having succumbed to the old-fashioned precept that a liberal education was useful for more than vocational guidance and career enhancement, I chose to study philosophy as an undergraduate, more specifically...
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Iconography
Sounds of Silence
Avante-garde composer John Cage's composition 4’33” created at the midpoint of the twentieth century, was conceived of without a single musical note. In his monograph No Such Thing as Silence: John...
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Iconography
The Dark Side
Had friend David Meggesey, author of the highly regarded Out of Their League (selected by Sports Illustrated in 2002 as one of the top 100 sports books ever written) and former NFL...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
Big Cheese
OK, I admit that I am blind to the allure of books about food, chefs, or most of what seems to excite the foodie partisans of the reading world. I...
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Rare Medium
Our Favorite African War
Brit foreign correspondent Rob Crilly (currently covering East Africa for The Irish Times), having covered wars in Darfur, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, has spent five years in...
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Iconography
A Lop Bam Boom!
David Kirby (The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems), who is a poet by profession (as in calling, not career), put together an extended hagiographic essay on the...
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Confab
Who Knows?
Arguably there are two sure-fire subjects that will get you a book contract: the current (everlasting) educational crisis and depression. And if you are a discerning reader (which, for the...
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Current Reads
Day in the Life
James Hynes (Kings of Infinite Space) is another on a long list of novelists who I have been meaning to read based on excellent and well-rendered notices and a scanning...
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Iconography
My Kinda Town
These days geography has devolved to a chauvinism and regional rivalry not quite as virulent as evidenced in the Balkans and former Yugoslavia. Much of this can be laid at...