THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader The Sontag Award By rights, the latest Susan Son-tag Award—our acknowledgment of inanity by intellectuals and artists—belongs to playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in...
...Whatever," Stone replied...
...And the measure of a culture's health is the capacity to pass a little of that hard-won wisdom back in acceptable ways to the young...
...New Yorkers are a lot less hawkish...
...Along the way, she reared four children, two from her first marriage and two from her marriage to Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary...
...The trouble is that they aren't worth thinking...
...Then he told the New York Times, "People who have suffered oppression can recognize oppression when it appears...
...But Kushner's prize was snatched away at the last moment by Oliver Stone, director of such films as JFK and Natural Born Killers...
...Along the way, she fought innumerable battles, but it is her struggles with the feminists she recounts in greatest detail: her irritation with the bad prose and worse ideas of Betty Friedan, her debate with Gloria Steinem, her observation of her female friends undergoing the strange transformation into unhappi-ness all around her...
...But it turns out that wisdom is found mostly down the long road of everyday life...
...But An Old Wife's Tale is aimed at a different place: It is not just a personal memoir but an ongoing and compelling argument that life well-lived has a shape and an arc...
...So wise...
...F— your order.'" (Christopher Hitchens interrupted at this point to suggest it wasn't revolt but "state-supported mass murder...
...I think, I think . . . I think many things...
...Some become petulant and self-absorbed...
...She edited for a period at Basic Books, ran the anti-Communist "Committee for the Free World," held a fellowship at the Heritage Foundation, and landed for a time at the journal First Things...
...A few grow wise...
...Midge Decter is now in her seventies, and part of what makes her new memoir so fascinating is the wisdom she's found along the way...
...BY J. BOTTUM If only the palace of wisdom really were found on the road of excess, we would be so wise these days...
...Some turn crochety and strange in age...
...She worked for Harper's in the exciting days when Willie Morris was the editor...
...One wishes Midge Decter had indulged in more gossip from the 1950s to the 1990s...
...Stone later added, "All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood...
...At a recent film panel, according to the New Yorker, Stone began by denouncing the "new world order": "I think the revolt of September 11th was about 'F— you...
...A Life in Full Midge Decter remembers...
...At each point in her life—confronting the assaults of communism, Freudian-ism, feminism, and all the rest—she was the voice of sanity, insisting that life has a shape, an arc from birth to death, that we cannot alter simply by wishing it were otherwise...
...The Standard Reader The Sontag Award By rights, the latest Susan Son-tag Award—our acknowledgment of inanity by intellectuals and artists—belongs to playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America...
...If Americans begin to realize the interconnectedness of things through even something as horrible as terrorism, then perhaps we can start to realize the world is a complicated place...
...He started by telling the Los Angeles Times, "I'm hoping people will be respectful of the horror—unlike Bush, who led what seemed to be a peprally on a mass grave...
...We know what collateral damage, as the Pentagon calls it, looks like up close...
...But what makes it even more fascinating is that she lived her life in the midst of the deluge, the era in which American culture decided all the old wisdom was outmoded...
...The arc of An Old Wife's Tale runs from Minnesota, where she grew up, to her life in New York...
...she seems to have known every public intellectual in America, and she always has something interesting to say about them...
Vol. 7 • October 2001 • No. 7
