"Memorial" is a word that we usually associate with the dead, but its etymological roots stem from a living process, the act of memory, recalling vital deeds and past associations. How can anyone who knew him forget our vital connection to Paul Benedict? For years, he was a vivid presence...

I first met Paul Newman when he was a student at the Yale School of Drama in the late forties. Having recently abandoned that training program in order to help start two acting companies, I nevertheless still had friends at Yale. One of these was the director, Elliott Silverstein, who...

McCain and Unable

2008 BUMPER STICKERS
By Robert Brustein

DEMOCRATIC SLOGAN: BARACK TO THE FUTURE

REPUBLICAN SLOGAN: TO HELLERY AND BARACK

DEMOCRATIC RUNNING MATES: BARACK AND FROTH

REPUBLICAN RUNNING MATES: McCAIN AND UNABLE

DEMOCRATIC PROMISE: YES, WE CAN!

REPUBLICAN REBUTTAL: NO, YOU CAIN'T!

ANTI-DEMOCRATIC SLOGAN: NO-KNACK BARACK!

The humorist James Thurber once wrote a story called "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox," in which he imagined General Ulysses S. Grant surrendering his sword to the Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the drunken delusion that his Union forces had been licked in Virginia. Our present Commander-in-Chief...

A recent New York Times obituary of Huntington Hartford, the much-married millionaire A&P heir, described all his failed philanthropic ventures in art, architecture, theatre, recreation, publishing, and penmanship. The piece gave me a pang since it reminded me of a meeting I once had with him in his twenty room...

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each have serious spoilers in their campaigns, on the verge of destroying their hopes for the presidency.

For Barack, the spoiler is his ex-pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. For Hillary, it is her husband, the ex-President Bill Clinton.

Bill's bizarre behavior during the Clinton campaign...

While Americans in the workplace, the university, and the arts, are laboring to find ways to express their cultural diversity, we are witnessing a consummate example of the process in Iraq. Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, among other tribal hegemonies who have been refining cultural identities and religious differences for...

There has been considerable controversy lately over who in the next administration should be answering the White House phone at 3 in the morning. Although Hillary's advisors contrived that commercial in order to raise doubts about Obama's inexperience, the strategy seems to have backfired. No one on the team seems...

Obama's extraordinary momentum in the last 11 primaries is partly a triumph of casting. Hillary Clinton has not found a consistent role to play either on the campaign trail or on the debate platform, and Obama has. In an age when the camera captures every detail of a person's mood...

If there is a single clarifying distinction to be made between the Clinton and the Obama campaigns it is this:

When Bill Clinton says "We," he means Hillary and himself.

When Barack Obama says "We," he means himself and the American people.

The extraordinary surge of confidence and goodwill generated by the Obama victory in Iowa has brought hope to many American hearts that our sorely divided country may at last have a chance to be united again.

That same condition is also increasing fears that, with all this expectation embodied in...

In recent years, Americans have expressed disapproval first of the F word, then of the N word and now of the B word. I would like to propose a new candidate for denunciation -- the I word. The Latin for I is Ego, and there is no question that some...

For many centuries now, three major religions -- Islam, Christianity, Judaism -- have been proclaiming the superiority of their monotheistic creeds to the "savage" polytheism of more "primitive" belief systems. The worship of multiple gods has virtually disappeared in the West, while the idea of a single all-powerful deity is...

The Romans had a phrase for it -- Ubi sunt -- meaning "where are those who went before us?" It is, admittedly, a question every generation asks the one that succeeds it. Naturally, the younger generation is always found to be wanting.

Yet, even allowing for the generational...

The period of The Great Impeachment has been followed by a period of intense retrospection. This is the process that has occupied Congress during most of October 2007, when for the first time in American history an entire Administration was unceremoniously dumped from office. One by one, every Bush...

The recent death of Beverly Sills from lung cancer was a severe loss to the American performance world, but it also brought deep grief to the island of Martha's Vineyard. The Vineyard has lost a number of its more celebrated summer residents over the past months, including William...

Everyone is going to have an opinion about the startling -- many would say shocking -- unresolved conclusion of The Sopranos. Here's mine.

My initial reaction was that David Chase, hardly queasy about brutal mob killings, could simply not bring himself to murder Tony Soprano -- at least on screen....

A few weeks ago, the veteran playwright Richard Nelson, who is also chair of the playwriting department at the Yale School of Drama, gave an anguished keynote address to the Laura Pels Foundation. Less a speech than a howl, Nelson deplored the way the dramatist was being pushed around in...