Monthly Archives: June 2012

Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon once said, “would wake up with a hundred ideas. Of them 95 were dangerous; three more were bad; the remaining two, however, were brilliant.” The historian Mordechai Bar-On, who has published a new book on his former boss Moshe Dayan: Israel’s Controversial Hero (Yale, £18.99), would argue that the late IsraeliContinue reading “Dayan’s lesson”

Screwball, the most American subgenre of comedy, is satirical but gentle-satirical. It pulls its punches. Not about its leads, whom it skewers mercilessly, but about bigger social questions. There is no political consciousness to be found in a screwball comedy, or at least not one with the edge of a critique. Even the Depression-era ribbingContinue reading “A love letter with laughs”

America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats) By David Gelernter Encounter, 185 pages Why is the American academy so monolithically left-wing? David Gelernter, himself a tenured professor of computer science at Yale, attempts an answer in his new book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In theContinue reading “Reign of ignorance”