Marjorie Williams

Vanity Fair and Washington Post writer Marjorie Williams garnered accolades in the final years of her life for her moving writings about her battle with liver cancer. But earlier in her career, Williamswho wrote frequently for the Washington Monthlywas best known for her penetrating profiles of Washingtons political elites. Writing in the Monthly in 1991, […]

Or so say Suzanne Garment and Larry J. Sabato, lending their very different voices to the chorus of analysts who have lately specialized in second thoughts about the cloud of scandal that enshrouded the Reagan administration and then drifted down Pennsylvania Avenue to engulf the House leadership and the Keating Five. Their books both argue […]

Those who passed through the ninth floor, including women who bore such later-famous bylines as Gloria Emerson and Charlotte Curtis, lived in a different ethical universe from the men who labored in the city room six floors below. “Fashion was New York City’s most important advertising industry,” Robertson writes. “We were never allowed to forget […]

For at least half of this lively book, Douglas, a professor of media studies at Hampshire College and media critic for The Progressive, makes a good case. One of the great undertakings of academic feminism is to reconstruct and dignify the history lived by women in every age, often scantily recorded or, even where preserved […]

Beyond Gender is a rambling recap of a pair of seminars that Friedan chaired, in 1994 and 1995, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. These gatherings, ominously billed as New Paradigm Seminars, aimed to define a progressive political movement–or ethos, at least–that would subordinate the identity politics that have dominated liberalism (and feminism) […]

The Nurture Assumption, which was born to a glowing profile in The New Yorker and a Newsweek cover story, is commonly referred to as the Parents-Don’t-Matter book. Bluntly, it is Harris’s thesis that the only lasting influences on one’s personality are genes and peers–the peer groups of childhood and adolescence. Our common belief that what […]

The First Partner, the work of a right-wing writer, has the strange air of having been conceived and written about six years ago. It includes, of course, an account of last year’s scandal; but mostly it’s a book that woke up when Hillary first burst upon the scene and decided that America must be saved […]