Word: polemicists
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Actually, it's the biggest U.S. project of Rem Koolhaas, the influential Dutch architect-thinker and hipster-polemicist. "For me it's a building that accommodates both stability and instability," he says. "The things you can predict and the things you can't." What he means is that the library is designed to accommodate whatever new technologies and purposes it may have to serve in the future. And Koolhaas is somebody who understands all too well the power of things you can't predict. The library, which opens officially next month, is not just a new symbol for the city...
...legacy. Chief among them are two engrossing biographies: George Orwell by British author Gordon Bowker (Little, Brown; 495 pages) and Orwell: The Life by British novelist and critic D.J. Taylor (Chatto & Windus; 466 pages). Also stoking the fire are two slimmer works: Why Orwell Matters by polemicist Christopher Hitchens (Basic Books; 211 pages) and an entertaining look at Orwell's second wife Sonia, The Girl from the Fiction Department by Hilary Spurling (Penguin; 208 pages). These additions to the mountain of Orwelliana provide new intelligence on one of literature's most puzzling figures. Like the time he used black magic...
Douthat: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. No one is suggesting that Cornel West is saying things that should get him fired from Harvard, or anything like that. All we are saying is that Cornel West has become in the past five or 10 years a polemicist. I mean, if you open up the Cornel West Reader or Race Matters or read any of his op-eds, he’s saying things that—while they aren’t utterly loony—they are of a certain extremely left wing stripe that is?...
...first task at Brown will be to heal one such rupture last spring after the student paper published an incendiary ad by conservative polemicist David Horowitz arguing that blacks economically benefited from slavery. "There's no safe ground for anybody in race relations, but campuses, unlike any other institution in our society, provide the opportunity to cross racial lines," says Simmons. "And even if you're hurt, you can't walk away. You have to walk over that line...
...looked only at the subjects Suzan-Lori Parks has tackled--racism, homelessness, sexual hypocrisy--you might mistake her for a polemicist. Yet her dislocating stage devices, stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and wondrous. Not one but two of her plays revolve around a character who makes a living as an arcade attraction playing Abraham Lincoln; patrons pay to impersonate John Wilkes Booth, grab a pistol and shoot him. (The image simply "burned itself into my mind," she explains.) Her spiky plays often take place in a strange nowheresville and feature Greek...