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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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And the question of whether the changes in the three versions are Shakespeare's own evolving "revisions" of Hamlet, his successive drafts, will reopen the argument about what kind of writer—one-draft wonder, or serious reviser?—Shakespeare was. And what kind of evolution—self-revision—Hamlet himself went through.

The signature drama of the divided soul has now been subdivided.

David Simon, executive producer, The Wire; former metro desk reporter, The Baltimore Sun
In the year past, we've been given the clearest indications yet as to the future of the daily newspaper in America. And that future is brutal, reductive, and ever-less relevant.

The Los Angeles Times, which thought itself to be in the highest tier of daily journalism and therefore immune to the economic logic, is told to eviscerate itself, and when chief editors refuse, they are summarily dismissed. The Baltimore Sun is hollowed out by a string of buyouts that began more than a decade ago. The Philadelphia Inquirer is confronted with new ownership that demands a news organization with no pretensions beyond covering its circulation area. In their desperation to float their stock prices, the big newspaper chains are slowly strangling the only thing that still makes their daily editions matter: content.

For years, the Kool-Aid drinkers from the home office have journeyed to newsrooms far and wide to explain to the ink-stained rabble that these were new times, that by attritting the numbers in the newsroom, by offering buyouts to veteran reporters, by reducing the news hole, the American newspaper could not only remain viable economically, but could—given effective management—do more with less.

Here's a secret: You cannot do more with less. You do less with less. To gather more news, to investigate more wrongs, to analyze more of the complexity of modern life, you need more experienced reporters.

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