New Criterion articles from January 2006

New Criterion archives from January 2006

Stop the presses!(Notes & Comments: January 2006)
January 1, 2006... A report from UCLA has the amazing news: "Media Bias Is Real"! Who would have thought it? A press release from the university summarizes the painstaking research of Tim Groseclose, a political scientist at UCLA, and Jeffrey Milyo, an economist...

Where's the outrage?(Notes & Comments: January 2006)
January 1, 2006... Bob Dole may have lost the election to Bill Clinton in 1996, but he asked the campaign's best question: "Where's the outrage?" Mr. Dole would be asking that again were he to contemplate the behavior of the press. We're thinking of the...

A new low at the Times.(Notes & Comments: January 2006)(The New York Times Book Review)(Brief article)
January 1, 2006... We've had several occasions to remark on the astonishing metaphysical feat of The New York Times Book Review. For as long as anyone can remember, it has been an embarrassment, as bad as it was possible for such a mainstream paper to be, and...

Roger Shattuck, 1923-2005.(Notes & Comments: January 2006)(Obituary)
January 1, 2006... It is with sadness that we note the passing of our friend Roger Shattuck, teacher, poet, essayist, and literary observer par excellence. Roger was the sort of man-of-letters one reads about but scarcely encounters any more: literary to his...

Introduction: after the suicide of the West.
January 1, 2006... "It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought.... Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other." --Richard Hannay in John Buchan's...

Limits to democracy.
January 1, 2006... As its Greek name suggests, democracy is an ancient idea. But it is only a recent ideal. Greek writers either warned against democracy, or regarded it as simply one among many forms of political order, and not intrinsically preferable to its...

National identity & the corruption of history.
January 1, 2006... Since the 1970s, the dominant voices within academic history have worked to generate a widespread cynicism about the nature of Western democracies, with the aim of questioning their moral and political legitimacy. In the United States, the most...

Targeted jihad: the crisis of the Netherlands.
January 1, 2006... Events four years ago in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania alerted a somnolent world to a campaign against the West which had been growing for decades. From September 11, there was a benchmark. To those who lied that there was no terrorist...

Epiphany at Hurcott.(New poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2006... Epiphany at Hurcott Profoundly silent January shows up clamant with colour, greening in fine rain, luminous malachite of twig-thicket and bole brightest at sundown. On hedge-banks and small rubbed bluffs the red...

In Ipsley Church Lane I.(New poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2006... In Ipsley Church Lane I More than ever I see through painters' eyes. The white hedge-parsleys pall, the soot is on them. Clogged thorn-blossom sticks, like burnt cauliflower, to the festered hedge-rim. More than I care to...

The jumping boy.(New poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2006... The jumping boy I. Here is the jumping boy, the boy who jumps as I speak. He is at home on the king's highway, in call of the tall house, its blind gable end, the trees--I know this place. The road,...

David who? Milne at the Met.(Art)(David Milne Watercolors: 'Painting Toward Fire Light,' The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
January 1, 2006... Some artists' work, like certain wines or cheeses, doesn't travel. Why is unclear, although it seems to have less to do with merit than with such intangibles as connections, relationships with dealers and collectors, self-presentation, the...

The field of honor.(The media)
January 1, 2006... Last month's review of the media (See "In Defense of Cover-ups"), in which I speculated about why the Bush administration hardly ever took the trouble to reply to the ever shriller chorus of its critics, had gone to press only the day before it...

Not argued but shown.(Books)(Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Discursive prose by itself can get you a long way--or else the academic towers would have fallen ages ago. But the most memorable writing usually employs a device, a trick which focuses the attention precisely by diverting it. Thus there is...

Papa Ratzi.(God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... George Weigel God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church. HarperCollins, 320 pages, $26.95 For a few weeks last April, Rome was once again the center of the world. Day by day the news from the Holy...

Palpable designs.(Wordsworth: A Life)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Juliet Barker Wordsworth: A Life. HarperCollins, 576 pages, $29.95 If we are to read Wordsworth at all it must be in bulk, for the best effects in The Prelude (1805, 9253 lines; 1850, 7878 lines) and The Excursion (1814, 8850...

A garrulous creature.(Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Amy Clampitt Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt, Edited by Willard Spiegelman. Columbia University Press, 336 pages, $39.50 Some thirty years before she began rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ted Hughes and...

The artificial gravity of n+I.(Notebook)(Column)
January 1, 2006... In wartime Britain, an oil-rationing poster asked: IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? Of the four young men who founded the magazine n+I, I have to ask: is your journal really necessary? It may be in the public interest to save ink for a...