Articles by Benj DeMott

ELGIN REDUX? When Chicago Bulls forward Luol Deng missed his second of two free throws with two seconds remaining and his team leading 108-106 in the third game of the Chicago-Cleveland first round NBA playoff series, it was clear LeBron James would not have an overtime period of five minutes in which to add to … Read more

In 2007, in the midst of a glut of anti-Iraq-War plays, experimental theatre venue P.S. 122 presented the most challenging piece of political theatre that I’ve seen performed in New York in my lifetime: Young Jean Lee’s Church. Political theatre aims for efficacy – it means to change the world. But few works of art … Read more

Fifty years ago, the Israeli film industry was largely churning out pro-Zionist propaganda films (Ephraim Kishon being the rare exception). To represent its face to the world in 2010, Israel brought to the Academy Awards an Arab-language flick co-directed by a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli, focusing largely on inter-Arab issues; Ajami was one of … Read more

The fallacy that great events have great causes tempts both film critics and civilian interpreters to explain mass ticket sales in pretty grandiose terms. Avatar, touted to displace Titanic as the movie with the biggest box office gross in history, has provoked this impulse with a vengeance. The film critics are the least of it: … Read more

Nothing lasts forever. After several decades of dire warnings about its frailty, what if the novel — long the linchpin of print culture — has finally died? It can happen; one day, it will happen. We novelists used to have the public by the nape of its collective neck, dependent on us for the lion’s … Read more

“Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.” Disraeli published Sybil, or The Two Nations in 1845, when his two nations were very famously the rich and the … Read more

In Game Three of the Cleveland-Orlando NBA Eastern Conference Finals, with the Cavaliers trailing 77-70, announcer Doug Collins reached for an adequate descriptive term for Lebron James, and came up with: locomotive. On the very next play, James drove the middle and collided with Dwight Howard, Orlando’s all-league center, who has been described as “insanely … Read more