A great failure

• Wise words from New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright on the fallout from 9/11:

I feel like it's been a great failure of our artists and writers that we haven't done a better job at looking at ourselves and how we are and how our own behavior, to some extent, contributed to this tragedy...

America has lost so much standing in the world and we're going to have to do a lot to recapture it, but it begins with self-examination and I don't think that we have gone through that.

Granted, Wright's on the dog-and-pony-show circuit to plug his new book The Looming Tower, but still...

Introductory salvo

You don't often get the chance to sit down with a legend when you're 18:

• Interview with Elmer Bernstein (April 23, 1998)

Hannibal really deserved a spanking:

• Hannibal, Or: A Question of Taste (March 21, 2001)
  

9/11 changed everything:

• "Nothing else matters" (October 1, 2001)

And here's what happens when you realize you're stuck in geekhood forever:

• Memoirs of a True Geek (October 15, 2003)