Daniel Wattenberg

"IT LOOKS LIKE you've got some competition, Teddy," said Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "I do?" replied a puzzled Theodore White.

"WE ARE LOOKING for subjects," Ken Burns recently said of his documentaries, "that hold up a mirror to who we are." Mark Twain is the subject of the director's latest film, a two-part special that PBS will air on January 14 and 15. And what Burns sees reflected back at him by Mark Twain bears…

Movie Love in the Fifties by James Harvey Knopf, 464 pp., $35 IF YOU PICKED UP a copy of James Harvey's last book, "Romantic Comedy in Hollywood," you have a notion of what he prizes in movies: wit, skepticism, independence, feistiness, joie de vivre, mystery, and sexiness. In his new "Movie Love…

IN HIS LATER LANDSCAPES, Paul Cézanne often elaborated the center of his pictures while leaving the corners unpainted, so the sky was only implicit in the blank patches of canvas. In his Henry Bech stories, recently collected in The Complete Henry Bech, John Updike turns Cézanne inside out: he…

The Beatles Anthology

Spinning Blues Into Gold

Growing up in Manhattan in the early years of the twentieth century, the bookish and introverted Julius Henry Marx dreamed of becoming a doctor. Instead, he dropped out of school just before his bar mitzvah and went into show business, at the insistence of his mother. Yes, to please his Jewish…

Conversations with Wilder

Welcome to Pleasantville, the town portrayed in the satirical allegory now playing in theaters, the first feature film directed by Gary Ross, who wrote the movies Big and Dave.

Remember when Pat Buchanan "discovered" unemployment in New Hampshire during the 1992 presidential campaign? And shocked George Bush and the political press by flirting with 40 percent of the GOP primary vote? Outside shuttered shoe factories in the snow, he suddenly understood the political blind…

Anne Rice

We all know what Clintonism is: the unacknowledged appropriation and successful electoral exploitation of our ideas. Well, now it's spreading. Into the culture at large. The days of conservative exclusion from the culture are over. These days, the conservative sensibility is more likely to be…

"The half hour before midnight is for doin' good," according to Minerva, the voodoo witch in John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. "The half hour after midnight is for doin' evil." And these days in Savannah, Ga., the setting for Berendt's many-layered non-fiction tale of an…

Punk, the most notorious pseudo-movement in the history of 20th-century popular music, is becoming cuddly with age. The Sex Pistols, punk's most outrageous act, has reunited after almost two decades to travel the United States in the aptly named Filthy Lucre Tour. The Pistols are without their…