The Year in CultureStanley Crouch, Azar Nafisi, Michael Pollan, and others on the most amazing—and disappointing—events of 2006.

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Lorrie Moore, author, Birds of America
Theater! Especially the moving and ghostly last acts of Faith Healer and Grey Gardens: Ralph Fiennes' transcendent rendition of Brian Friel's soliloquy of death and Christine Ebersole singing "Another Winter in a Summer Town," Grey Gardens' one good song (which like the Friel is about the doom involved with losing one's powers, especially if those powers were capricious to begin with).

Azar Nafisi, author, Reading Lolita in Tehran
I can name a few amazing, as well as a number of disappointing, cultural events for 2006, but none can match my sense of outrage at the so-called Holocaust conference convened by the Iranian government. I felt outraged as a human being, because, like all the great human catastrophes, the Holocaust transcends its own time and place, concerning not just the Jews and those who tried to eliminate them but the rest of mankind, and when we deny it or remain silent about it, when we manipulate it for political purposes, we become complicit in the assault not only against the actual victims but against all that goes by the name humane.

As an Iranian, it was with a sense of tragic irony that I witnessed a regime that has denied Iranian citizens the right to freedom of expression and freedom of religion, and has systematically repressed, jailed, and tortured thousands of its own citizens for demanding their most basic rights, claim to provide freedom of expression for neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

I had to remind myself that, while the ruling elite in Iran convenes such an event in the name of the country's culture and religion, many Iranians boast of the fact that more than 2,500 years ago, a Persian king, Cyrus, after the conquest of Babylon, allowed the Jewish people to return to their land and permitted the practice of all cults and beliefs of the countries he had conquered. The ancient city of Hamadan is the site of the pre-Islamic temple of the water goddess Anahita, the Mausoleum of the vagabond poet Baba Taher, and the shrine of the Esther—believed to have been the wife of the Persian king, Xerxes—and her cousin Mordecai, who together rescued the Jewish people from extermination. These sites represent the best of the Iranian culture and tradition, its diversity, its passion for poetry, its hospitality and generosity toward others. And yet, today when we talk about Iranian culture, none of this comes to mind.

Josh Patner, writer on fashion, Slate and the New York Times
Until the night of Oct. 5, the knockout moment of the year in fashion happened at Alexander McQueen's March show in Paris. Following a spectacular parade of clothes based on the designer's wild imaginings of the Scottish Highlands, a tiny blue light—a hologram—appeared on the stage, bouncing through the air until it bloomed into swirling, translucent lavender petals, and then bloomed again, this time into Kate Moss. Kate floated through the air and disappeared, and the audience cheered and rose to its feet. This was pure fashion: the outrageous reach for beauty, the here-and-then-gone illusion, the extravagant expense for a limited audience.

America Ferrera in Ugly Betty Then I saw the Oct. 5 episode of the ABC comedy Ugly Betty. Betty, the unattractive assistant of a hotshot fashion-magazine editor, has lost "The Book," or mock-up of the upcoming magazine. Fashion has never seemed so integrated into the popular culture as it did when Betty's fashion-obsessed young nephew gasped, "You lost The Book?!," in a way Bobby Brady never could have.

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