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For all his mordant skepticism regarding the motives, tactics, speech acts, capabilities, and apparel of the Sixties left, DeLillo had always taken seriously its assertion that US society as it actually existed was indistinguishable from the ideal of an exceptionally prosperous and long-lived fasci…

Of course, the Eighties have some bearing on the present world. The demise of organized labor, the decline of real wages, and the diminution of consumer industries faced with third world outsourcing; the primacy of finance and the shift toward mass incarceration justified by draconian drug laws; th…

And what of the era’s other strangely serene presiding figure, Reagan himself? As early as February 1989 the architectural historian Mary McLeod could write architectural history in real time by interrogating in the journal Assemblage what was already received wisdom:

“Postmodern architecture i…

What placed postmodernism more in the service of the corporation than of society at large was that it was client facing, not user facing: it established cultural conditions in which a corporate officer could choose to believe they were, Medici-like, acquiring a work of art with all its useful cultu…

The more meaningful your life is, the less happy it’s possible to be. That’s what I’ve been thinking lately. The more you occupy yourself with the Big Stuff—the tragic, the political, Life and Death and Truth—the less whimsical you can be, the less frivolous. Of course, that’s not how I felt when m…