The ’80s I thought I remembered now feel very different to me.
For at least a year, the mail room in Penguin’s New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dog—named, for some unknown reason, Yalta—to screen packages. On one especially unnerving Saturday the few employees in Penguin’s 23rd Street office that day looked out their windows to see thousands of New York–area Muslims who’d arrived to protest the publication of The Satanic Verses bowing to Mecca in unison. The management of the company behaved with disgraceful cowardice.
For a work titled The 50 Year Argument, the film is wrapped in a thick wadding of consensus about the brilliance of the NYRB.
For a work titled The 50 Year Argument, the film is wrapped in a thick wadding of consensus about the brilliance of the NYRB and its two (and remarkably, only two) editors, Robert Silvers and the late Barbara Epstein, with no real arguments adduced about that or the political, literary or cultural positions it has taken over the past half-century. The lamentable result is reverent to a fault, The Last Waltz for eggheads, with the bite and spark of an hour-and-forty-five-minute infomercial.
