Almost every day I get a message asking me why I defend Israel and Jews. Most of the queries are sincere, while others are meant to be an accusation of sorts. Basically, people are accusing me of doing what I myself acknowledge I’m doing. Maybe they except me to snap out of a trance and…
The snakes are loose
April 8, 2014
One of my all-time favorite films is Crossfire. It’s got everything I love in art: surreality, beautiful women who break your heart, insane authority figures always on the edge of violence, the sense of everything spinning out of control, and fantastic writing: “The snakes are loose.” The story is about homicidal bigotry, but that’s not…
Is female beauty in fiction really a problem?
November 5, 2013
The novelist Adelle Waldman—author of The Love Affairs of Nathanial P.—recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker titled “‘A First-Rate Girl’: The Problem of Female Beauty.” In it, Waldman says the following: You’d think it would also be a rich subject for fiction writers—after all, our attitudes about beauty and attraction are tightly bound…