To Criticize the Critic

By Charles O'Brien

Tom Hale’s measured praise of First of the Year ends up as a funeral oration for the paper... Not so fast. His review has a simple structure. First of the Month set out to be a (the?) new Partisan Review; between 9/11 and Iraq, it lost its way hopelessly; the major journalistic organs of liberalism now stand vindicated. Let’s take it point by point: Hale’s Partisan Review thread is the least predictable of the three, but the most tiresome. Continue reading "To Criticize the Critic"


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Unwritten Rules

By Benj DeMott

It’s been an elegiac time for our crew lately. In the past year, we lost (among others) Hans Koning, Ellen Willis, George Trow, Kurt Vonnegut and, a year before that, Benjamin DeMott. They were First readers as well as writers for our tab. You could count on them to give it to you straight and there were occasions when one of their opinions could outweigh all others due to its cogency. There are no substitutes for irreplaceable elders but we’ll try to sustain what they valued in First by finding new originals to help carry us into the future. Which, sorry to repeat myself, remains unwritten (despite the chorus of that slack Natasha Bedingfield song). Continue reading "Unwritten Rules"


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First of the Year: 2008 here.


Jesse Jackson and Black People

By Amiri Baraka

We're honored to reprint Amiri Baraka’s reflections on Jesse Jackson, Dukakis and the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta. The history he witnessed has a new resonance. Baraka’s convention narrative seems like an important part of the back story of our own time. And thanks to Jesse Jackson’s animadversions and contradictions – the drama don’t stop. Here’s a taste of what's in the body of the text... Continue reading "Jesse Jackson and Black People"


The Birth of Our Power

By Kate Millett

We’re honored to reprint this (slightly adapted) excerpt from Kate Millett's Going to Iran (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1982) -- her inspiring, heartrending and newly relevant account of her time in Tehran witnessing women’s struggles against Islamist misogyny after the fall of the Shah.

Today is expected to be a very big gathering. We have already passed throngs of schoolgirls marching and singing along the way, holding hands or carrying banners proclaiming women’s rights. The sight is beautiful, their hopefulness, their courage. Later we will hear that several were stabbed, and a child, a thirteen-year-old girl in her school middy, was smashed in the mouth with brass knuckles. Which here are called American knuckles. Continue reading "The Birth of Our Power"


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