The 50 Year Argument,” a 2014 documentary film on the history and influence of
The New York Review of Books, opens, as one critic put it, “with a tender and hard-hitting monologue about the subjectivity of journalistic stories due to the impossibility of the human mind being able to objectively record and store memories from our lives.” Scorses’s film is far more exciting than the above sentence may indicate. It captures a time in New York when left wing radical chic was practically the whole of intellectual life. The so-called New York ‘right’ at the time (as represented by William F. Buckley’s