Whitewash as Public Service
The 9/11 Commission Report has just been reissued with a new afterword. The following critique of it by the late Benjamin DeMott first appeared in 2004 in Harper’s Magazine. DeMott’s essay remains...
View ArticleHooking Up: Benjamin DeMott on Tom Wolfe
Benjamin DeMott published this summative review of a late collection of Tom Wolfe’s work in 2001. It makes a good case for the reviewer (whose own work has seemed fresh to pundits lately). DeMott’s...
View ArticleMobile Souls: On “The Brothers Karamazov”
First published in 1984. Freud thought The Brothers Karamazov “the most magnificent novel ever written,” and the current literary wisdom attributed the preeminence of Dostoyevksy’s masterpiece—the last...
View ArticleHanging out with Horses (in the 80s)
THERE WERE A HALF-DOZEN wonderful family shots in our batch of holiday Polaroids — but so far I’ve had eyes for only one picture in the pile. It shows Tom, our older boy, and my wife holding a horse,...
View ArticleCharacter of the Assassin
The author wrote this right after JFK’s assassination, finishing it on the day Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby. It was published in The New York Review of Books and in the essay collection,...
View ArticleNever Grow Old (A Review of John Irving’s Novel About Abortion)
All hail Laurie Stone for her ironic commendation of that Times piece about men’s reactions to the overturning of Roe vs. Wade: “After enslaved people were emancipated, the NYT similarly sent reporters...
View ArticleHells and Benefits (Benjamin DeMott on Sexology in the Seventies)
Originally published in The Atlantic in 1975. Are sexologists dumb? I’ll admit that’s an impolite question—and I’ll also admit that a little of my skepticism of the sexological tribe stems from...
View Article
