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
Angel Headed Hipsters
Sometimes I actually take note of how many days are like that winter holiday where people are encouraged to spend all the money they make on gifts, and then they...
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Iconography
Red and Dead
Back in the closing years of the last century, Jon Lee Anderson, who currently writes lucid and useful dispatches from the world’s hotspots—current and future—for the New...
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Iconography
House of No Mirth
My sense of the fin-de-siècle years in American pop culture and the decades leading up to them is that the reactionary ‘70s were followed by an era of escalating...
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Back in the Day
That Was Then and Now
There is something odd about a quintessentially American book having been written by a Frenchman, an oddity perhaps compounded by being one of the most unread well-known titles in American...
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New Finds
One Is the Loneliest Number
As I write this, the honorable literary organization PEN is holding its Sixth Annual World Voices Festival of International Literature, which is a thing of wonder and joy if you...
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Back in the Day
Wind Is Risin’
The assassination-history business in the U.S., while not a thriving enterprise, does provide an occasional narrative from a decidedly warped point of view—though of the successful presidential assassinations,...
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Back in the Day
Uncle Sam’s Birds and Bees
Sex education has always seemed like a counterintuitive enterprise to me—which doesn’t reduce its importance in a culture which, at the least, broadcasts mixed messages about sexuality and...
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Rare Medium
Bad News for Good News
Besides the malcontents and know-nothings who are apt to bleat out various accusations about some media conspiracy (failing even to understand the distinction between media and journalism), for the most...
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Poetry
Feeding the World
I suspect there are not many collections (if any) like The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris of Words Without Borders). Gathered within its...
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Bookbag
What the World Needs Now
Just what the world needed, another award and another award show. Denis Loy Johnson, of Melville House Publishing, who is a shrewd and savvy fellow and outspoken journalist (and who...
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Current Reads
Stories for Real Readers
Though throughout my reading life I would occasionally read short fiction, it wasn’t until I spoke with writer/Florida State University creative writing program head honcho Mark Winegardner that...
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Back in the Day
There Was a Time
Before compact discs, before cassette tapes, before eight-track tapes, there was a playback medium called the long-playing record. It was a 12-inch disc (there were also seven-inch discs called “singles”)...