Paul Buhle

It is difficult, even now, to grasp how many revolutions—artistic, political or economic—exploded during the 1910s and how thoroughly they have been digested and turned against their best purposes. Or perhaps this is too easy and gloomy of an interpretation. A century is a blink in human history, and the effects have not been erased,…

Perhaps now, a decade or so since the landmark study of a unique but mostly forgotten director, can the importance of Edgar Ulmer be appreciated.  Or perhaps not. Ulmer so successfully evades categorization, and dwelt so often and long in the low-production-value world of films, that he has not yet truly emerged as an important…

This volume, by a cultural scholar teaching at Indiana University, South Bend, could not have appeared at a more auspicious moment. Some Facebook participants describe it as ”the most talked-about book,” and with good reason. It speaks about the long and (for the most part) quietly held non-zionist sentiments of many Jewish Americans.  At a…

The collapse in recent years of a major comic distributor, leaving hundreds of thousands of comics of all kinds unsold, marks yet one more phase in the genre’s long boom-and-bust history. Frederic Wertham, long known as the bete noir of comics at the close of their historic heyday, has often seen as the witness for…