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No one paid closer attention to the media feeding frenzy surrounding the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. than Steven Brill. In his analysis of the press coverage of that event in his new magazine, Brill’s CONTENT (“Curiosity vs. Privacy,” October 1999),1 the eponymous periodical’s chairman and editor-in-chief considered and critiqued the media’s increasing intrusion […] A good friend of mine, living in the Nordic countries for some years, recently emailed me to ask a favor. Her co-worker, founder of an innovative digital project for artists and teachers and the general public, found himself hitting a brick wall with his venture in its start-up phase. He and I haven’t met yet, […] Lately I’m pondering the case of scholar and teacher Mary Daly, about whose current struggle with Boston University you may have heard. Daly, referred to by one supporter as “a radical feminist star,”1 found her courses dropped from the catalogue by this university, at which she’d taught for decades, when she chose not to obey […] It was easy to mourn the “death,” in the winter of 1998, of Bobby Simone, the sweet-eyed detective who passed away prematurely of heart failure on NYPD Blue. For those who watch this series regulary, Simone (played by Jimmy Smits) was the obvious hero: big, hunky, tender-hearted, caring, loving, miraculously uncompromised and uncontaminated by the […] An acquaintance of mine, Geoffrey F., who lives in Köln, Germany, once suckered me into a long argument about the Holocaust — not about the event itself, but mostly about how many Jews seemed to have a proprietary relationship to the word, an unwillingness to share it with groups who’d undergone different but terrible catastrophes […] I’m proposing Dave’s Law: No establishment serving food shall be allowed to list on its menus or announce via its waitpersons more than a maximum of four ingredients or preparation methods involved in any one dish — upon penalty of having to serve the entire party burgers on the house. […] (Continued from the March issue. In the first part of this tale, I recounted some of my experiences on a summer 1988 group tour the Soviet Union, and the experience of one member of the group, Ari, a 14-year-old from the U.S. of Jewish descent, at Babii Yar, site of a mass grave for 200,000 […] From the daily press, the radio, the tv and the Internet comes the constant updating of changes in eastern Europe: disintegration, upheaval, power structures collapsing and reforming, old boundaries coming down, new ones going up. And, underneath it all, an ominously familiar drone: a steady rise in the incidence of anti-Semitism in the former Soviet […] (In last month’s column, I spoke about a large photography show I’d curated almost two decades ago, in 1980, for the Newhouse Gallery at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center; titled “Silver Sensibilities,” it included work by Roy DeCarava, Allen A. Dutton, Richard Kirstel, Michael Martone, and Julio Mitchel. One Islander raised objections to the show’s […] The malignant, lingering spectre of Puritanism stalks the land today, rattling its chains everywhere from the Senate floor to our exhibition spaces for contemporary art. Contemplating this revenant has reminded me of my own encounter with it here on Staten Island, back in the fall of 1980. The Island’s indefatigable champion of the arts, Dan […] |