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I'm not sure learning and escaping are so contradictory. Some might object to one of my suggestions, Simon Sebag Montefiore's remarkable "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," as a summer tome, but you'll learn a lot and, somehow, it's morbidly quite entertaining. For escape, and a lot more, I would recommend "Dino," Nick Tosches' bio of Dean Martin, because by the end you won't be quite sure what hit you.
The Current Discussion: All four Oscars for best acting went to non-Americans. Is Hollywood's cultural hegemony finally breaking up? Or are we Hollywoodizing foreign talents like Javier Bardem and Marion Cotillard?
When non-Americans do well in Hollywood, it’s further proof that the debate on cultural hegemony entirely misstates the nature of culture in general, mistakenly depicting it as something static and one-sided.
Culture, and cinematic culture in particular, has always been about admixtures, optimal blends, the impetus to appeal to as many people as possible—and to make money. That’s why from the outset Hollywood attracted foreigners. Chaplin was British. Von Stroheim was German; Garbo was Swedish, and so on. Far from being an example of American cultural hegemony, Hollywood was a fantastic, equal-opportunity Moloch, swallowing what and who it could to produce art for profit’s sake, and rather often for art’s sake, as the MGM lion informs us.
The Current Discussion: The American magazine Foreign Policy and British magazine Prospect have published a joint list of the world's Top 100 Public Intellectuals. The list includes several PostGlobal panelists. Who's missing from the list? Who would you take off?
The literati will cringe, but the first name I always search out for on these lists is Oprah Winfrey. Why? Because when she’s not on a list, you know that the thinking that went into preparing it follows a very traditional pattern of what a public intellectual should conform to.
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