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Oct 20, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | David Mikics
In 1962, Norman Mailer sat down to debate his friend William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was America’s most influential conservative, and Mailer was a homegrown radical. Mailer boldly proposed, “End the Cold War. Pull back our boundaries ... Let the Communists flounder in the countries they acquire. The more countries they hold, the less supportable will become the contradictions of their ideology.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | David Mikics
I don’t remember when I picked up my first issue of MAD. But by the time I was 10 years old, in 1971, I was a rabid fan, waiting religiously for each new issue. The peak of my MADness coincided with the magazine’s greatest success. Its bestselling issue ever, No. 161 (September 1973), was one of my prize possessions: The cover, a spoof of The Poseidon Adventure, showed a drowning Alfred E. Neuman with his skinny legs sticking out of a life preserver.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com | David Mikics |Claude Béata |David Watson |Tasneem Jamal
Thousands of books are published each month. And as much as we’d like to, we can’t read (or review) them all. But what we can do is point out a few we think you might enjoy. In that spirit, here’s a rundown of forthcoming titles that caught our eye and may catch yours, too. *****The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America’s Brain! byDavid Mikics(Library of America).What, me worry? A look at how Alfred E.
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | David Mikics
It was a commonplace among right-minded people at the dawn of the 20th century that hatred and bigotry were the products of ignorance and would be eliminated through the sanitary means of education. Unfortunately, the horrors of the 20th century would prove this theory to have been radically false.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | David Mikics
The New York intellectuals, Irving Howe once said, were obsessed “by the idea of the Jew (not always distinguished from the idea of Delmore Schwartz).” Delmore, as everyone called him, was a boy wonder, opening the revamped Partisan Review’s first issue in 1937 at the age of 23, with his perfect short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” (The issue included work by Picasso, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Wallace Stevens, and James Agee, but Delmore’s story headed the table of contents.)...
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Jun 6, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | David Mikics
One hundred years ago this week, Franz Kafka lay on his deathbed, coughing up blood. By his side was his last, most devoted girlfriend, Dora Diamant, with whom he had fantasized about emigrating to Palestine. Now he was too feeble to crawl out of bed. The tearjerker death of the most saintlike modern author closes the new television miniseries Kafka, starring Joel Basman and scripted by German novelist Daniel Kehlmann and the series’ director, David Schalko.
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May 22, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | David Mikics
Remember the heady days of 2020? Progressives trained by the richest universities in the land suddenly had the chance to remake America in their image, the way they had always dreamed of doing. The result was so obvious and crushing a failure that one is no longer supposed to talk about it. Four years later, the power elite have discovered that their cosplay revolution is seen as merely ridiculous. Minority groups don’t want the new names that have been issued to them.
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | David Mikics
Saul Bellow, who passed away this day in 2005, once the most celebrated of late-20th-century American writers, is now barely taught in universities, disdained as an out-of-date fogey with, we are told, conservative-adjacent hang-ups. But readers will always return to Bellow. Every so often I meet people whose faces light up when they discover I have written about him. Bellow, they tell me, lifted them out of the doldrums and into the clouds.
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Feb 27, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | David Mikics
“If an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson’s volumes,” John Jay Chapman remarked. “He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin.” Chapman, a devoted reader of Emerson, was not wrong.
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Jan 30, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | David Mikics
On Jan. 19, Harvard University’s interim President Alan Garber appointed Derek Penslar, William Lee Frost professor of Jewish history, as co-chair of its Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism. (The other chair is Raffaella Sadun, a professor in the Harvard Business School.)It took only a few hours for blood to appear in the water. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., quickly called Penslar an antisemite.
