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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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
Like Your Back Ain’t Got No Bone
Though I am certain a regular diet from the overflowing stream of brain science would result in unconscious mimicry of various symptoms, I have continued to find neurologist Oliver Sacks’...
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Back in the Day
Is It Good for the Jews?
The relationship of the Israelites to capitalism is, of course, the stuff of ethnic mythology and racial slander—Jews are both the sniveling Fagin-like shylocks controlling the world’s economy...
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New Finds
Oh, Canada
A number of Canadian authors of my acquaintance—Gil Adamson, Wayne Johnstonand, Michael Ondaatje—have sung the praises of Newfoundlandian writer Lisa Moore (Alligator). Now comes her second novel, February ...
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Iconography
Bayonne Barney
These days bookstore shelves are littered with biographies of defrocked, repentant (and repulsive), scandal-laden politicians, not to mention the sorry batch of whatcha-ma-call-its by their current and former wives, courtesans,...
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Iconography
Good Golly, Miss Molly!
Not to name drop or anything but I had the pleasure of “interviewing” (I don’t call my conversations with writers and the like interviews, but that is not what...
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New Finds
Shop ‘Til You Bop
My temptation to refer to Lee Eisenberg’s (The Number) career as “storied” was tempered by a sudden echo of George Orwell’s famous “Politics and the English Language,” in...
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Genre Genre Genre
The Eyes and Ears of Texas
Growing up with John Wayne in the movies and Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, Maverick, and the classic Have Gun—Will Travel, I have noted...
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Iconography
The High Priestess of Soul
There are artists—musicians and actors—who once they take the stage, their power up there is so compelling that for those moments when they are before you, nothing else...
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Back in the Day
The Judeophobic Virus
Hebrew University of Jerusalem historian Robert S. Wistrich‘s new tome, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House), is a whale of a book, not...
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Current Reads
Destination Unknown
I’d be surprised that if you are here reading the results of my keyboard clattering(s) you haven’t somehow heard about The Melting Season (Riverhead) by Jami Attenberg ...
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Current Reads
Death Be Not Proud
According to pollsters, two thirds of the U.S. population support the death penalty—disregarding racial discrepancies or anomalies in its administration. Interestingly, Texas, where attorney David Dow resides and...
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Poetry
Come Fly With Them
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has collaborated with ornithological illustrator par excellence David Allen Sibley to create a sweet little compendium, Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems...