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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Coffee Table Gallery
Keeping Hope Alive
Given, as they say, the objective conditions besetting our country (need I list them?), it would not be unreasonable to consider whether the United States (of Embarrassment, to quote Eminem)...
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Back in the Day
The Shower Scene That Changed the World
As long as I am levitating in the mid-last century, I should note that Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking film Psycho, released in 1960, is the subject of David Thomson’s latest...
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Rare Medium
Naked Lunch Redux
I’m having difficulty recalling what William Burroughs (who died in Lawrence, Kan. in 1997) is best known for—being an unabashed (rehabilitated) junkie, being a unrepentant homo (Alan Ginsberg wrote...
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New Finds
The Ghost in The Squirrel Machine
OK, first, my initial impression of cartoonist Hans Rickheit’s new book The Squirrel Machine (Fantagraphics) was one of amazement (a word I don’t bandy about indulgently) and bafflement....
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Back in the Day
The Original Trotskyite 2.0
Back in 1995 (or ‘96), Jon Lee Anderson’s definitive biography of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevera was published, and within a short time two others joined the Che historiography. Since then there have...
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New Finds
A Polish Joke
You might think that receiving rave endorsements from writers such as Milan Kundera (“one of the greatest novelists of our century”) and John Updike (“a master of verbal burlesque…one...
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Current Reads
Crimes of the Utopian Left
Ten years ago, controversial French intellectual/political philosopher Jean François Revel (How Democracies Perish, The Totalitarian Temptation), who died in 2006, published Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism...
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Rare Medium
Mad for Magazines
They are dropping like flies: Last week Kirkus and Editor & Publisher, this week ID, the venerable design magazine. As a recent TMN headline noted, over four hundred magazines closed in 2009 ...
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Back in the Day
Good Wood on U.S. History
Pulitzer-winning Brown University history mentor emeritus (The Radicalism of the American Revolution, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787) Gordon Wood has a lucid and elucidating take on history’s...
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The Book Was Better
On Bookshelves Now
If you visit this space occasionally you might know the high regard I have for journalist Michael Lewis and how moved I was by his story, The Blind Side, which...
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The Coffee Table
Black Beauty
It stands to reason that the impressive Deborah Willis (Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present), MacArthur fellow, artist, photographer, curator, historian, author, and educator who...
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New Finds
Four Million Years
Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto first called my attention to the distinction between residence and citizenship, pointing out that in France, living in Paris makes you Parisian, not French. I am...