Robert Appelbaum

In the 1970s, when the New Deal consensus began to erode, something unexpected started to play a role in popular culture. It was the decade after the industry-approved release of The Pawnbroker (1964), the first Hollywood film to show women’s bare breasts, and all the old ...

It still feels like the morning after. People still have headaches, feel dizzy, nauseous, confused. What happened? A party controlled by inept bullies has been swept into power with a parliamentary majority of 51%. Stalwart objectors point out that under the UK’s ...

A good way to flatter public speakers, teachers, or politicians is to call them “dynamic.” When the nineteenth-century social critic Thomas Carlyle first used the word, he compared “dynamism” to “mechanism.” The latter had to do with the repetitive energy of mere ...

It took about thirty years for the major temples of the Acropolis in Athens to be built in the fifth century BCE. It has been forty years since the Acropolis Restoration Project was founded, and it is not known when its work will be completed. What the casual visitor sees on the ...

Unfortunately, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice provides one of the best models for understanding the drama of the debt crisis in Greece today. I say “unfortunately” because, after all, the (sympathetic) villain of the play is Shylock, a Jew whose very Jewishness ...

Don’t get me wrong. Most of Athens is fairly clean. The subway stations are spotless. Trash is picked up and the streets are swept. But then you stumble across something like this: a hallway of the huge, nine-story School of Philosophy building in the University of Athens, ...

Just down the road from Kolonaki, the most fashionable district in central Athens, lies Exarchia, a bohemian city within a city, home to artists, students, intellectuals, shopkeepers, and, most notoriously, anarchists. The neighborhood is a shrine to the art of graffiti—block ...

In seven years’ time, Athens has been transformed from one of Europe’s gleaming capital cities to Europe’s version of Detroit—much of it dirty, forlorn, its storefronts abandoned, its population in decline. Graffiti is ubiquitous. There are homeless beggars huddling on ...