Books

Following the lead of CNN’s Brian Stelter, Thursday’s Situation Room touted the spike of sales in the book 1984 and strongly hinted that Americans view the Trump administration as the real-life version of Big Brother portrayed in George Orwell’s classic.

“The most important development of the last half-century in American politics,” believes New York magazine’s Chait, is “the Republican Party’s embrace of movement conservative ideology.” In a Thursday post, Chait cited six books, none of which was written by a conservative, that “help elucidate” this phenomenon. Among Chait’s choices: E.J. Dionne’s Why the Right Went Wrong; Richard Hofstadter’s…

The front of Monday’s New York Times presented some truly groundbreaking journalism: President Obama likes to read. Book critic and Obama idolizer Michiko Kakutani’s long farewell piece was plotted to make the departing president look like a thoughtful intellectual: “How Reading Nourished Obama During the White House Years.” It’s the sequel, awaited by no one, to her front-page report from…

Next Tuesday, three days before the current POTUS becomes an ex-POTUS, Jonathan Chait’s Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail will be published. On Tuesday, New York magazine, where Chait is the chief political pundit, ran an excerpt from the book in which he claimed, “The truth is that Obama enacted careful, deep, and mostly popular solutions to a…

New York Times critic Dwight Garner wrote an embarrassingly florid tribute to first lady Michelle Obama, in the guise of a book review, on the front of Friday’s Arts section: “Eyes on a First Lady Unlike Any Other.” Garner was reviewing the work of 16 equally smitten liberals under “The Meaning of Michelle: 16 Writers on the Iconic First Lady and How Her Journey Inspires Out Own. He began by…

Megyn Kelly is a journalist, but she’s also a sort of actress, suggested Isaac Chotiner in a Monday review of her new book, Settle for More. To Chotiner, Kelly’s a conservative who plays a nonpartisan on TV. She has “done her best to cloud her real agenda.” And it’s worked: she has “wide-ranging respect and admiration among a press corps generally (and rightly) suspicious and dismissive of Fox…

Just in time for the upcoming presidential election, popular book publisher Simon & Schuster has just released a new book for children aged 4-8 years old about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She, of course, most recently made headlines for speaking out critically against presidential candidate Donald Trump, an action that was blasted by even liberals for stepping outside her…

The New York Times appears to be playing games again with conservative authors, trying to keep them off its vaunted (and secretively manipulated) Best Sellers list. This has happened to Ted Cruz, to Dinesh D’Souza, and to David Limbaugh. This case is more ironic: Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel has a new book out called The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free…

The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured former book editor Sam Tanenhaus talking about several news political tomes under the rubric “Why Populism Now?” And when we say “talking about,” we mean using the books as a pretext to slime Republicans as demographically doomed, out-of-touch racists. Also: Libertarians give you cancer.

Every year the New York Times tries to ruin the summer movie season with the pair of fun-deprived, politically correct movie critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, who solemnly count up and analyze female characters on screen before declaring the portrayals sexist and the numbers insufficient. The bean-counting joylessness has expanded to another artistic field, with theatre critics Laura Collins…

No one can imagine that the terms "Islam" and "filthy religion" would be associated with each other in the pages of The New York Times. But in the Sunday Book Review, an article on Tom Bissell's history of the apostles of Jesus Christ began with this stunning turn from poet Christian Wiman: "Nietzsche believed that if only a Dostoyevsky had been among the apostles who followed Jesus, someone who…

Call it Harry Potter & the Goblet of Grievance.  J.K. Rowling has run afoul of the Indian indignation industry. According to Huffington Post, the author is in heap-big trouble for not being sufficiently sensitive to the diversity within the “Native American wizarding community.” 

The New York Times often uses its book review to make liberal political statements under the cover of criticism, whether by praising books by liberals that bash conservatives, or eviscerating books by conservatives that attack the left. Sunday brought the first kind, summed up by this online teaser: "Dark Money argues that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially…