Brendan Bernhard

The American Nightmare

Brendan Bernhard
We haven’t got a European dream yet. That’s what we’ve got to get! We’ve got to get a dream! A dream to build on! —Eddie Izzard America may be the world’s only superpower, but when it comes to projecting an alluring vision of the future, we are being left behind......

Fox Convention II

Brendan Bernhard
The day after the Republican convention I ran into a fellow scribe, busily clicking away at his sunlit laptop, on the terrace of a café in downtown New York. Had I, like him, been hearing that the convention had been a disaster for the GOP? he asked. “Well, er, no,”......
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Age of Innocence

Brendan Bernhard
Novelists, unlike rock stars, often improve with age. Which is especially appropriate in Julian Barnes’ case, because The Lemon Table, his most recent collection of short stories, takes age as its subject. That sounds grim, of course — not what your average person would consider a “selling point” — but......

The Fox Convention

Brendan Bernhard
“The Europeans are impotent, are they not?” barked Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly at Pat Buchanan a couple of hours before Senator John McCain took the stage on the opening night of the Republican National Convention. And sitting at home, I looked straight at the television screen and said: “Yes, Bill,......
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The Ideal Elegist

Brendan Bernhard
Illustration by Brooks Salzwedel Thanks to Hollywood, we all carry a noir vision of 1930s Europe in our heads — rainy streets, upturned collars, glowing cigarette ends and spies, spies, spies. But readers of Alan Furst’s seven novels of “historical espionage,” of which Dark Voyage is the latest, carry something......

Tempest From a Teapot

Brendan Bernhard
Illustrations by Julie West Activism used to be arduous. Not anymore. Click a button, move a mouse, and bingo — you’re in the world of online political campaigning. A few more clicks and you can sign petitions to Congress protesting the war, the Clean Air Act and the No Child......
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Life of a Dodo

Brendan Bernhard
Illustration by Stephan Britt The dodo, for those who aren’t up on their ornithology, is a bird that became extinct late in the 17th century. Living on the otherwise uninhabited island of Mauritius, dodos, having no need to protect themselves from predators, became too lazy to fly and eventually lost......

Deaniacs for Kerry (More or Less)

Brendan Bernhard
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Howard Dean was shouting into the microphone, and nobody could hear a word he was saying. The crowd at last week’s Take Back America conference in Washington, D.C., had risen to its feet and was yelling and screaming and cheering so wildly it no longer mattered what......

Meeting Al-Jazeera

Brendan Bernhard
Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures “At Al-Jazeera, we don’t have taboos, we don’t have red lines,” said Samir Khader, a senior producer at the controversial Qatar-based news network. “When I come to work, I start by raising the question, ‘Have you heard of a new red line, a new taboo, to......

Unobstructed

Brendan Bernhard
During an interview in March, Lars von Trier told me he was a great admirer of The Alexandria Quartet, a lavishly sensual and exotic work of fiction by the late British novelist, poet, diplomat and travel writer Lawrence Durrell. Given that the left-wing director’s recent film, Dogville, was the most......