You know, I really don't mind that huge Michael Kinsley essay in last Sunday's NYT Book Review. Okay, granted it's only about books in the limited sense that they provide Kinsley with an excuse to lay out his argument that "the great flaw in American democracy...is the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty." I've observed before that Sam Tanenhaus runs pieces that appear "more NYRB than NYTBR," and this stories fit in perfectly with his professed "news about the culture" approach. And sure, the books he references were all published two to four months ago—but unlike some NYTBR haters who think Tanenhaus has been "late" covering some titles, I've become convinced that it's okay to put some distance between a book's pub date and its reviews, even if this isn't necessarily optimal from the publisher's perspective. Frankly, I'm glad that the Review has gotten around to given Pat Buchanan's State of Emergency at all, after their failure to notice Samuel Huntington's Who Are We? in 2004. (I mean, really, when the guy who coined "the clash of civilizations" announces that America's being overrun by immigrants, you'd think that was worth a few review inches, right? But apparently not.)

Actually, the review that set off my radar was another "news about the culture" item, David Margolick's questioning of David Mamet, who writes about anti-Semitism and Jews who reject Judaism in The Wicked Son. "In fact, apart from various Internet wackos, anti-Semitism, at least the American strain, has waned," Margolick observes. "How else to explain the very assimilation Mamet so detests?" I certainly hope he's right; on the other hand, Mel Gibson's a little more prominent than an "Internet wacko," and then there's a recent ad in a Wyoming congressional race, where the Republican incumbent attacked her Democratic opponent for being "from New York," a phrase often deployed as a wink-wink reference to Jewishness. (In all fairness, though, the Democrat's campaign manager said she didn't see it as anti-Semitic.) Anyway, whether Margolick is "right" or "wrong," his review's another example of a "news about the culture" story that is willing to treat cultural icons with less than total reverence—see also Henry Alford's putdown on Amy Sedaris last week. When they're done badly, such pieces are just aimless griping, but when they're done well, they bring both liveliness and topicality to the Review...exactly the qualities, I like to imagine, that Tanenhaus has been trying to foster in his reviewers.