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The artists of the Eighties acted fast. They had to: there would be no future otherwise. But in battling the retrograde Reaganite look of the System, they knew they were its bastards nonetheless. They took on organized religion by altering its iconography, not destroying it. Consensus uncoolness, d…

Some time after, not long, at the same Barnes and Noble, I chose to read White Noise. One year later I owned all his books and suspected I was meant to be a writer. Literature, I found, was like a high school. Certain people hang out with each other; there is gossip and grades. I read The Correctio…

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…