Is The Ascent of Females The Decline of Males?

Written by John Strausbaugh on June 1, 1999. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Lionel Tiger and Helen Fisher are both Rutgers anthropologists. Both have new books out. And both are pissing people off. Tiger’s book is called The Decline of Males (Golden Books/St. Martin’s, 323 pages, $23). Fisher’s might well be called The Ascent of Females, but she chose instead to update Simone de Beauvoir and call it The
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Are We Post-Apocalyptic Yet?

Written by John Strausbaugh on May 25, 1999. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

There’s a line of scholarly thought that says the 20th century was peculiarly preoccupied with apocalyptic thinking. Part of the stimulus is artificial—the millennium—but it’s also been a logical response to concrete, “traumatic” events. The notion, as James Berger, an assistant professor of English at Hofstra, posits it in his book After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (University of Minnesota Press,
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Written by John Strausbaugh on February 9, 1999. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Since the 1960s Harry Mathews and Robert Kelly have been two of the finer experimenters with the form and function of contemporary American literature. Naturally you never heard about them the way you do mainstreamers like Updike or Roth or whosit; of course neither made that 100-best list last summer. (I’d put at least one of Kelly’s prose poem collections,
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Written by John Strausbaugh on February 2, 1999. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Two Saturdays ago Ms. Diane and I were sitting in a little outboard-rigged rowboat in the middle of the bayou that oozes off Lake Martin near Lafayette, LA. The day before there’d been that icy storm in New York; here it was like springtime, mild and clear. The sun was setting in a silent, spectacular blaze way over beyond the
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Written by John Strausbaugh on January 19, 1999. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

She’s not two months into her new post as the Voice’s “Press Clips” columnist and already Cynthia Cotts’ copy glows with the sweaty sheen of desperation. Not that I keep myself up nights worrying about the careers of Voice writers, but she seems to be struggling. You wouldn’t have thought her predecessor Jim Ledbetter’s shoes would be so hard to
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Written by John Strausbaugh on January 12, 1999. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Moles. The skin doctor lasered them off with a shrug, but I have to tell you I was spooked. A sunburn is one thing, random skin-cell mutation is another. A few weeks later, a colleague who’s sailed all his life reported a similar experience. First time in his life, a sunburn turned into a weird rash, followed by strange
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