The rising generation of leaders knows next to nothing about the great thinkers who have shaped our history. Who can blame them? They have been educated during the Great Forgetting. We have embarked on a remarkable experiment: a society governed by those who have little knowledge of the humanities, . . . . Continue Reading »
The fashion show suggests that there is no exit from the Longhouse that doesn’t involve partnership between the sexes. Continue Reading »
George Frazier had a story about the first time he met John O’Hara. The journalist and clotheshorse Frazier was introduced to the novelist O’Hara while hanging out at a Greenwich Village jazz club. The famously cranky O’Hara looked Frazier up and down before inviting him to have a drink. . . . . Continue Reading »
An audio version of “Dress Up,” by G. Bruce Boyer (June 2017). Continue Reading »
For quite a few years now, academic philosophers and sociologists, as well as popular social commentators who get paid to pronounce on such matters, have been telling us that people have been abandoning their formal personas in favor of the whims and behavior of their individual selves. The . . . . Continue Reading »
This week, over 100,000 fashion insiders will gather in New York’s Lincoln Center for dozens of designer shows at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Copies of copies of copies of this year’s outlandish silhouettes and bizarre prints will end up in our closets a few years from now, and we will wonder how we ever thought them strange. You might not know, however, that the industry and the art Fashion Week showcases are just a few hundred years old. Continue Reading »
. . . one can change human institutions, but not man; whatever the general effort of a society to render citizens equal and alike, the particular pride of individuals will always seek to escape the [common] level . . . In aristocracies, men are separated from one another by high, immovable . . . . Continue Reading »
This and the next will be the last songbook posts on pop-music movies for a while. Despite my doing five(!) posts on ALMOST FAMOUS , two on the SCHOOL OF ROCK, and an epic one on THE DOORS, I do think that among my list of pop-music films , THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO is the standout in terms of sheer . . . . Continue Reading »
Pop music critic Simon Reynolds, in his book Retromania , and style-writer Kurt Andersen, in his “You Say You Want a Devolution” essay, have their finger upon a certain pattern in our contemporary cultural scenes of recyle-ment, repetition, and lack of forward motion. To be more specific, . . . . Continue Reading »
The Resurgent Liberal: And Other Unfashionable Prophecies by robert reich random house, 303 pages, $19.95 There are no liberal neckties. At a conservative gathering one will generally find a smattering of Adam Smith neckties. In the back of conservative magazines, there are likely to be one-column . . . . Continue Reading »
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