The Year in CultureStanley Crouch, Azar Nafisi, Michael Pollan, and others on the most amazing—and disappointing—events of 2006.
Updated Saturday, Dec. 30, 2006, at 6:04 PM ET
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StumbleUponThe fashion world reached unprecedented levels of exposure this year, with Project Runway, The Devil Wears Prada, and Betty suggesting that the inner workings of fashion, long a mystery, are better understood by fans. Yet for all the exposure, the world of true fashion insiders has never seemed more insular. Betty has 13 million viewers, but there were only a few hundred seats at McQueen's show.
Michael Pollan, author, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
I have to salute Stephen Colbert for the concept of "truthiness," which is a 2006 contribution to American culture that should last, or at least deserves to. Colbert's work all year long amazed me—as much sparkling satire as anyone got written in 2006.
Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate; author, Jersey Rain
Political comedy—funny, passionate, informed, smart—not long ago seemed not an American form. European cabarets or Latin American writers could slash, while American comedy made cautiously topical, evenhanded wisecracks. Garry Trudeau looked lonely. Saturday Night Live, even in its best days, was limited. The running gag, "In breaking news, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco is still dead," was kind of brilliant—and kind of self-diagnostic: easy target, minimal statement.
Now, in the mysterious life cycles of art, we have The Onion, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and South Park's Matt Stone and Trey Parker: all bringing it, American-style. The separate show for Colbert this year confirms the transformation. Bless cable ... or thank Cheney for his February quail shoot?
Ron Rosenbaum, author, Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars; columnist, the New York Observer
I'd argue that the development that will have the most lasting significance—because it will force us to reconsider, re-argue, re-envision the supreme icon of English literature—is the publication of the three-text Arden edition of Hamlet. The edition, produced by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, makes a persuasive case that the three earliest texts of Hamlet, which differ in ways great and small, should be presented separately, rather than "conflated" into the single Hamlet various editors have woven together from them.
Readers will now be made aware that some of the most famous phrases in Shakespeare—"the mote it is to trouble the mind's eye"; "the vicious mole of nature"; "the engineer hoist with his own petard"; "Denmark's a prison"; "nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"—and Hamlet's final, agonized 35-line soliloquy ("How all occasions do inform against me ... ")—appear in one early version of Hamlet but not in another.
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