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Just as we're surrounded by a world of microorganisms—some good, some bad, many imperceptible—our culture is continually under siege by small perversions of the written language. There are errors that help us digest meaning (Boyz n the Hood, Inglourious Basterds), errors that we educate ourselves against (the deli's offering of ''sandwichs'' ...

Next month would have been James Agee's 100th birthday, and although he came nowhere close to seeing it, he might have liked the peace and retrospection old age brought. Agee was a Deep Southern romantic tempered by the harder climes of New York literary life; he was also self-destructive, manic, and overwrought, dying in a taxi from his second ...

The latest revelation about the conflict between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley is that the two men may be very, very distantly related. Late yesterday, ABC News reported that the professor and his arresting officer shared an ancestor in Niall of the Nine Hostages, a fourth-century Irish king whose blood, we are told, runs ...

Though art in the past century has often sought to lay bare its own production—displaying the artists' inspirations and ephemera, making the circumstances of creation part of the work, parodying the commercial infrastructure of the industry—one subject that has largely been avoided is the complex, sometimes fraught, relationship between an artist ...

In 1915, D.W. Griffith, a Kentucky-born director who'd shot the first-ever movie in Hollywood, Calif., released The Birth of a Nation, a 190-minute film that imported old American horrors into a new medium. The movie is an extraordinarily elaborate piece of Ku Klux Klan propaganda, recasting the Civil War in order to blame secession and the ...

Posted on behalf of XX Factor contributor Marjorie Valbrun, who's experiencing technical difficulties: Sarah Palin pandering to Jewish voters while simultaneously being hyperbolic about the threat that Iran poses to Israel: We can't allow ''a second Holocaust'' against ''this peace-seeking nation'' where we'd one day like to place our ...