When I heard this afternoon that the great culture critic John Leonard had passed away at the age of 69, I was reminded again of some small but significant exchanges I had with him seven years ago, when I was the assistant literary editor of The Nation.

I was 26, had barely published anything, let alone a piece of criticism that could be considered "serious." I was a somewhat newly affirmed, politicized feminist, and deep in a phase of reading every book by Kate Millett I could get my hands on in preparation for reviewing her book Mother Millett, about caring for her aged mother.  read more »

New York Magazine's Vulture blog is reporting that the magazine's television critic, John Leonard, has died.

In addition to writing weekly for that magazine (last week he wrote about returning dramas), Mr. Leonard, who was 69-years-old, wrote a monthly books column for Harper's. He also served as a contributing editor for The Nation, contributed to The New York Review of Books and wrote regularly for The New York Times Book Review, where he had previously been an editor.

Senator John McCain isn't shy when it comes to talking about his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The first word in his Republican National Convention biographical film is "P.O.W." In an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in late August, he answered a playful question about how many houses he owns by saying, "Could I just mention to you, Jay, at a moment of seriousness, I spent five and half years in a prison cell. I didn't have a house. I didn't have a kitchen table. I didn't have a table. I didn't have a chair."

Senator McCain isn't the only one interested in his experiences. In the October Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg discusses how Senator McCain's imprisonment shaped his views in his cover story about the candidate. Also this month, Men's Vogue's features The Greatest Story Never Told, about Senator McCain and his cell mate, George "Bud" Day, by Corey Seymour.

But of all the stories of Senator McCain's POW experience, the one that might prove most controversial is in the Sept. 17th edition of The Nation. Veteran investigative journalist Sydney Schanberg offers a report about how Senator McCain, while constantly reminding voters of his experience as a POW, has gone to great lengths to hide details of other prisoners' lives—and deaths—in Vietnam. (A longer version of the story, complete with documents, can be found at The Nation Institute's Web site.)  read more »

With its September 29th issue, The Nation offers its own spin on The New Yorker's "The Politics of Fear" cover by Barry Blitt.

Mr. Blitt's cover, which ran in July, inspired a number of parodies. Now, The Nation revamped the image as "The Palin Trap," by Karen Caldicott (with cover design by Steven Brower). It shows John McCain in his Naval uniform giving a high-five (and his signature approving pointing gesture) to Sarah Palin, who's dressed in her aerial-wolf hunting camos. She holds a rifle in her free hand. The two stand atop a polar bear skin rug with the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall of the Oval Office across from a moose head and a model offshore oil drilling station with "Drill Baby Drill" written on its base.

In the fire place, of course, is the Constitution.

Manny Farber, the idiosyncratic painter and film critic for The New Republic, The Nation, ArtForum and other publications, has died. He was 91.

According to The Times' William Grimes, Mr. Farber was "a quirky prose stylist with a barbed lance, responded to film viscerally. He despised what he called the 'art-infected' films of cinematic greats like Welles and Alfred Hitchcock — 'the water-buffaloes of film art,' he once called them — preferring the work of genre directors like Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh and William A. Wellman, who transformed pulp material and genre conventions into 'private runways to the truth.'"

The Village Voice's J. Hoberman wrote:  read more »

The September 1/8, 2008 "Special Convention Issue" of The Nation features a striking cover of Barack Obama as a mosaic composed of hundreds of smaller images of other people, suggesting that Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, doesn't just stand for himself: He is all of us united. The cover line says it all: "What He's Made Of." (Like Soylent Green, he's made out of people.)

But the image, credited to "Gene Case & Stephen Bling/Avenging Angel From a Poster by Shepard Fairey, Illustrations by Christopher Serra," is also striking for its similarity to the cover of The Atlantic from December 2007, which also featured Senator Obama as the sum of many, many parts.  read more »

Another week, another fabulous Media Web Minute from MarketWatch's ace media critic Jon Friedman.

In this episode, a smirking, almost laughing Mr. Friedman plugs The Nation's new "Carnal Knowledge" sex and politics column ("Get it? Wink, wink... Smirk, smirk," Mr. Friedman says of the name), praising it as "a good idea... It makes a lot of sense." Mr. Friedman to neglects to mention the column's author, JoAnn Wypijewski ("Think Maureen Dowd meets Anna Quindlen," per Mr. Friedman), whom he interviews in the accompanying column. Then again, the video is only a minute.

Yesterday, Salon published a piece by writer Neal Pollack about his experiences with this year's moral panic-inspiring quasi-legal drug, salvia divinorum, in a piece called Confessions of a Salvia Eater.

Fans of Mr. Pollack will no doubt enjoy his description of what he saw on the other side:

I put the salvia in my freezer and didn't touch it for almost two years. Then I had a free midnight, and it occurred to me to try some. ... Almost immediately, I had visions. ... The next night, I repeated the dose. While I had a few small visions, I mostly felt that my body was stretching out beyond its boundaries, moving into infinite space.  read more »

]]> http://www.observer.com/2008/neal-pollack-has-visions-revisions#comments Neal Pollack Salon The Nation Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:32:34 -0400 Matt Haber 70911 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/2008/our-critic-s-tip-sheet-current-reading-4

Let’s give a warm New York welcome to the 10th anniversary edition of Phillip Lopate’s essential Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, $19.95), now in paperback and expanded to include material from the past decade.

We've seen many changes since 1998. The twin towers are gone. Rudy, too. The Yankees have quit winning the World Series. The rich got richer, again. Mr. Lopate detects a vein of anxiety about certain trends: “Some writers have warned that the city’s texture, its very character, is being eroded by a steady stream of luxury condominiums and national chain stores. In this apocalyptic vision, the destruction of New York will come not from terrorist attack but from the slow nibbling away of its soul by greedy, suburbanized blandness.” But browse awhile through this anthology and you’ll recognize that the city’s essence is eternal. Here, for example, is Tom Wolfe writing (writing!) in 1965, from a sweet little ditty called “A Sunday Kind of Love”:  read more »

]]> http://www.observer.com/2008/our-critic-s-tip-sheet-current-reading-4#comments O2 The Nation Tom Wolfe Mon, 04 Feb 2008 12:51:07 -0500 Adam Begley 64491 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/2008/nation-sort-endorses-obama

The Nation very rarely does endorsements, but in their upcoming issue that hits newstands tomorrow, Barack Obama is on the cover and it amounts to, well, something very close to an endorsement.  read more »

]]> http://www.observer.com/2008/nation-sort-endorses-obama#comments Media Barack Obama Super Tuesday The Nation Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:21:41 -0500 John Koblin 64385 at http://www.observer.com