Alan Greenblatt

This is the case that Setha Low, a cultural anthropologist at the City University of New York, attempts to make in Behind the Gates. She paints a picture of gated communities as separatist enclaves, with residents relying on gates and guards to wall them off from the contemporary world of crime and kidnapping. Low is […]

One of the biggest questions in the current war is what to do about rebuilding lower Manhattan. The families of firefighters and brokers and maintenance crews and back-office workers won’t be comforted much by the thought of their loved ones’ final resting place being the aptly but unfortunately named landfill Fresh Kills, where the World […]

That, in a nutshell, is the story of Borglum’s life, as told by John Taliaferro in Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore. The “classic Borglum” behavior was to “demand control, ruffle feathers, allege conspiracy, exaggerate evil–and lastly, foul the nest.” Borglum was clearly a disagreeable sort, a deadbeat […]