Essay

An interview I did with the very smart and charming critic Daniel Mendelsohn is up at The Millions.

David Lodge must be sleeping better, eating with gusto, laughing louder at Jim Crace’s jokes, and generally looking, say, five years younger and ten pounds (is that a stone?) lighter these days. Why? He has escaped the worst fate for a writer known to modern…

Forget Elia Kazan. When it comes to naming names in 1950s America no one was more ruthless than Dwight Macdonald, and he was at his most hostile in “Masscult & Midcult” (1960). This essay — jeremiad, really — is Macdonald’s…