This morning The Boston Globe published my article on the sale of 02138 magazine and how it could be a better, juicier read (my advice to them: don’t let the alumni write all the alumni notes—go dig stuff up!).

Here’s my article from yesterday’s New York Times Magazine about Louise Hay, a New Age diva and one of the best-selling authors you have never heard of.

Today in the Boston Globe Ideas section, for which I will now be writing every month, I have an article about Brian Leiter, a University of Texas (soon to be University of Chicago) law and philosophy scholar whose rankings of philosophy graduate programs have become highly influential and rather controversial. By all accounts, the vast majority of students applying to philosophy grad school now consult “Philosophical Gourmet,” as the rankings’ website is called. Leiter also has quite a reputation as a blogger and willing antagonist of those with whom he disagrees, which I also discuss in my piece.

Here’s my review, which first appeared in The Forward, of Atmospheric Disturbances:

Atmospheric Disturbances
By Rivka Galchen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $24.

Having just finished “Atmospheric Disturbances,” Rivka Galchen’s first novel, I find myself strangely unable to stop thinking about “Bandits,” the last Elmore Leonard novel I read. This is not because the two novels are similar, but because they are so radically dissimilar. Reading Galchen made me want to go reread Leonard, not as a complement but as an antidote. Galchen’s literary, cerebral book is about love, estrangement, emotional health and all sorts of important things, and it made me long for Leonard’s up-tempo, plot-driven pulp fiction about an ex-con trying to screw an ex-nun.

That’s not to say Galchen isn’t talented. For the first 80 pages or so, she proves herself a very good writer, funny and smart and heartbreaking. Here we learn about Leo Liebenstein, a middle-aged New York psychiatrist who becomes convinced that his wife, the Argentine beauty Rema, has been replaced by a look-alike aping Rema’s mannerisms. Leo now has a new preoccupation, finding his wife, to add to his pre-existing occupation, curing Harvey, a patient who believes he is a secret agent controlling the weather and receiving coded messages on page six of the New York Post. Like so many professionals who treat the odd, Leo is himself odd, but in a charming way, and as a narrator he’s a good companion. Although we know from the start that he is deranged — that the woman who looks like Rema really is Rema, not some replacement — we are rooting for him to somehow pull back from the abyss of illness. He’s too good a guy, this poor schlemiel, to go the way of his patients.

But as Liebenstein becomes more desperate in his search for the real Rema, eventually traveling to Argentina to ask her mother for assistance, the book stalls, then lurches, then finally gets stuck, wheels spinning in place. What had begun as an eerie whodunit, inviting the reader along as Leo searches for Rema and his sanity, becomes a deep excursus into the narrator’s ever-sickening mind. Leo borrows paranoid fantasies from Harvey, and soon he is just as estranged from reality. As Leo becomes less reliable, the reader is left to wonder what of his reporting is true and what isn’t: Does Harvey really join him in Patagonia? Does the mysterious meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen really send him e-mails on his BlackBerry?

An article by a real Tzvi Gal-Chen is quoted as an epigraph, but Tzvi’s relation to our author is never made clear in the text itself, and little depends on the answer. A lot of the book’s uncertainties are this way, interesting but never fully developed. This unstable reality could have been playful, engaging the reader in an educated guessing game, but there are no clues, and so there seem to be no right answers. The crazier Leo gets, the less interesting he is, and so it’s no fun to try to disentangle the crossed wires of his mind. A stopped clock is right twice a day, but it’s still mighty boring to look at.

Maybe not for everybody, though. More than most books I’ve read, “Atmospheric Disturbances” left me wondering: Is it me? Galchen’s sentences feel assured. Her subject matter is weighty, and nothing about the book is sloppy; it’s clear that attention has been paid. So here’s a typical passage, in which Leo is trying to gauge the extent of his own sickness. You be the judge:

We can similarly consider the “errors” of a suspected psychosis, the discrepancies between the presumably psychotic vision of reality and a consensus view of same. Such an examination could (occasionally, conceivably) reveal something other than prismatized fragments (taste of powdered milk + old woman with cataracts + holes in navy sweater + fresh pretzels = navy poisons milk the old pretzel factory workers drink down blindly) of the presumed psychotic’s mind. Because although psychosis is often popularly conceived of as an infection or a kind of foreign body, a psychosis is in fact as personal, as eccentric, as interpretable as a dream.

There’s a lot of this, and some readers will find it likable. It’s a mixture of precision and whimsy that has antecedents (Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace) but is clearly a new, original voice.

Embedded in my criticism is robust praise: Galchen has drawn an exquisitely realistic picture of a sick mind. In doing so, she has implicitly posed the difficult questions that some humanistic psychologists and philosophers have asked: How do we know what’s true? And what makes any of us qualified to judge another insane? One day Leo is the one prescribing the meds and committing people to hospitals — then one day the doctor sounds like the patient. But how much has he really changed? Meanwhile, there is another, more shadowy set of questions, about how well we really know those we’re sleeping with. Rema has changed ever so slightly — she brings home a dog, for example, having previously disliked dogs — but it’s enough to destabilize Leo’s faith in her identity. Readers might ask what assemblage of traits defines our partners. What’s essential to them? What’s disposable? The question is not, “If my wife began drinking whole milk, would I love her?” but rather, “If my wife began drinking whole milk, could I even be sure that it was her?” How much would she have to change before I became convinced, Leo-style, that she was a doppelganger?

These are difficult questions, and they tend to bog down. I wonder if this kind of psychology in fiction may work best with a heavy helping of plot — “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” anyone? — or at much shorter length, as in Adam Haslett’s sad, tortured story, “Notes to My Biographer.” Madness is always nearby, and it’s our instinct to flee from it. Only a very brave author gambles that she can compel us to look, and only a very fortunate one succeeds.

All Things Considered aired today a long segment on Portnoy’s Complaint in which I can be heard talking about sex, family, and not, thank goodness, Portnoy’s famous sex with organ meats.

Posted this morning on Huffingtonpost.com:

Posted this morning at Huffingtonpost.com:

I haven’t been following the to-do about Barack Obama’s preacher-man very closely, because I’ve already read enough to know this: people who think that Wright’s words have anything to say about Obama don’t just misunderstand Obama—whose record on racial harmony seems pretty unassailable—but they also misunderstand religion, too. And they misunderstand religion in a way typical of smug, myopic Americans.

Let me explain.

There is, underlying all the debate about whether Obama should be held accountable for Wright’s sermons, or for the “judgment” involved in being so close to such a man, a pretty stark assumption about what religion is, and how it functions in people’s lives. In short, you only think Wright matters is you think that Obama attends Trinity Church because of the beliefs taught there. And while it might seem obvious that people choose a church (or synagogue, or mosque) because they agree with its teachings, that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, I’d argue that for most people the beliefs of their church are a small, often insignificant part of why they attend.

They might attend because of the community there. They might attend because the church, like the evangelical congregation I hear advertised on WEHM-FM out of Long Island from time to time, offers free baby-sitting, plus a short service so you can “get home in time for the big game.” They might attend because of a cultural loyalty—and this can be true of Jews or Muslims or even Norwegian Lutherans, whose church might be their last meaningful tie to the grandparents who came over from Northern Europe. They might attend because the music and ritual are powerful.

They might attend a church with offensive sermons because having a pastor whom they disagree with is more interesting than having a pastor who never says anything controversial.

Americans, however, tend to think of religion in a very Protestant way (even Jews and Catholics make this mistake). And Protestantism, especially the Calvinist kind that set the tone for so much of our history and historiography, is the religion of belief par excellence. In that mold, ritual hardly matters, culture doesn’t matter—what matters is unmediated faith in the Word.

In this American paradigm, attending a church whose pastor you disagree with is total folly. But try telling that to the millions of Catholics who see no contradiction between fidelity to Rome and selective use of its teachings (how many Catholics do you know today with ten children?). Try telling it to Muslims with modern wives and daughters who attend a mosque with an old-world imam whose own daughters cover their heads; they may be worlds away from their imam on religion, even on culture, but attending prayer at the only mosque for miles around can still be a meaningful act.

Even religious practice—reciting certain prayers—can be gestural rather than literal. This is not news to philosophers (Wittgenstein articulated this idea quite clearly), and in truth I don’t think it’s news to most religious people, who even if totally devoted to the literal teachings of their church know others, every bit as faithful in their attendance, who are not. When I hear someone like Laura Ingraham babble on about l’affaire Wright so uncomprehending of these nuances of religious practice, what it tells me is not just that she’s silly, but also that she’s likely not very religious.

A review I wrote for the website of the journal I help edit, The New Haven Review:

A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe

By Geoffrey Hartman (Fordham University Press, 2007)

“I feel embarrassed,” writes the great literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman in this short, epigrammatic intellectual autobiography, “when, occasionally, younger colleagues, usually Jewish, address me as ‘my teacher.’ I realize this is fond and purely honorific, a secular version of ‘Rabbi.’ But it makes me aware of the fact that I have never thought of anyone in so personal a way as a role model.” This charming and defiantly smart book helps the reader to see that no one ever could have been Hartman’s role model. His is so quirky an intelligence — and so roundly informed by his own, sad past as a teenaged refugee — that his only teacher in fact was Wordsworth. Separated from his family during the war, lacking for friends, Hartman wandered the countryside with the Prelude for a companion. All that he has done since, all the difficult, brilliant essays and books, began in that war-haunted boy’s solitude with his slim volume of poetry. You can read this book for explanations of critical theory — though they are still too abstruse to make much sense to the neophyte — or you can read this book for the droppings of academic gossip (Paul de Man, Auerbach, Harold Bloom). But ultimately this book is worth reading above all for its depiction of the kind of mind that has gone out of fashion: the omnivorous European reader, fluent in many languages, autodidactic, with enough whimsy left to suggest that at Yale May Day be celebrated as Midrash Day. (“The idea had a longevity of two years,” Hartman writes, with a touch of gallows humor.) If we never really know the man — wife and family and pastimes hardly feature in this book — we know the mind, and we do get lovely reminiscences of the child, “father of the man,” as Wordsworth himself told us.