Film has been an integral part of the propaganda war fought between the United States and North Korea over the past decade. The international controversy surrounding the Hollywood comedy The Interview in 2014 vividly demonstrated this and, in the process, drew attention to hidden dimensions of the US state security–entertainment complex in the early twenty-first century. Using the emails leaked courtesy of the Sony hack of late 2014, this article explores the Interview affair in detail, on the one hand revealing the close links between Sony executives and US foreign-policy advisers and on the other explaining the difficulties studios face when trying to balance commercial and political imperatives in a global market.

Models – economic, mathematical, toys, manikins – are ubiquitous. This article probes one model, the Stettheimer doll's house, in order to understand all models better. The Stettheimers, three wealthy unmarried sisters living in New York in the early the twentieth century, attracted a remarkable melange of Camp artists and writers, identified by Arthur Danto as “the American Bloomsbury.” The Stettheimers were involved in many of New York's happenings, including the Harlem Renaissance and the innovative stage productions of Gertrude Stein. Androgyny, excess, racial mixing and theatricality flourished in the Stettheimer milieu. Carrie Stettheimer's doll's house, now housed in the Museum of the City of New York, captured this life. I consider this model for two related purposes. First, and more narrowly, I document the various effects this eccentric doll's house had on the artistic production of those in its vicinity, most notably on the novels of her sister Ettie and on the paintings both of her sister Florine and Marcel Duchamp. Second, I use the evidence of the doll's house's affect to discuss the agency of models in general.

In this paper we analyse one particular interaction: the development of a self-consciously “Eastern”-sounding music within Western pop music. We understand this in the context of several “journeys to the East”: some virtual (the interest in oriental religions, the adoption of Eastern musical forms) and some real (the journeys taken to the East by some musicians and by thousands of young people). We will consider, first, the milieu within which these changes took place, and then analyse the methods, scale and motivations of those Western artists who took inspiration from Eastern, mainly Indian, music in the 1960s and 1970s to create what became known as “raga rock.” Our aim is to demonstrate that these developments added up to a “neo-orientalism”: resembling the older, imperial orientalism in its tendency to simplify and romanticize the East, but different from it in the passionate sincerity of its admiration for certain Eastern forms, which were taken to the point of challenging dominant cultural and even political norms within the West.

This article sheds light on the stormy few months that James Schlesinger was CIA director. Schlesinger ranks as the least popular director in CIA history; indeed, he had to install a CCTV camera opposite his official portrait at Langley headquarters because of concerns it would be vandalized by disgruntled staff. Conventional wisdom dictates that he was disliked because he commissioned the “Family Jewels,” the notorious list of CIA dirty tricks which, when leaked in the mid-1970s, led to unprecedented public scrutiny of the agency. Using interviews with retired intelligence officers, spy memoirs, and recently declassified records, including Schlesinger's private papers, this article argues that the hatred went much deeper. A Nixon loyalist, Schlesinger was unpopular because he challenged the culture of the CIA and attempted to make the agency more of an obedient instrument of presidential power and policy. The so-called “Schlesinger Purge” – the controversial decision to fire nearly 7 percent of the CIA's workforce, especially from the Directorate of Operations – underscored this cultural attack. The speed and brutality of the change programme resulted in organizational miasma, leaving staff demoralized and with no means to fight back. The article also examines the consequences of the dislike toward him.

This paper examines the gendered aspects of consumer waste, dirt, and domestic mess in three early novels by Alison Lurie – Love and Friendship (1962), The Nowhere City (1965), and The War between the Tates (1974), set in 1969 – which I argue provide an incisive account of the transformation of gender relations over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. By focussing on the signifying potential of material objects in these texts, I seek to demonstrate Lurie's relevance to the “thingly turn” in literary criticism, to reignite interest in an author whose work has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, and to instigate a wider discussion of waste in her work as a whole, where it in fact proliferates. In broader terms, I hope to complicate existing scholarship on waste in literature (including my own in this area to date), which remains almost exclusively focussed on male authors.

American Muslims increasingly negotiate their relation to a government that is suspicious of Islam, yet which recognizes them as rights-bearing citizens, within a culture they claim as their own. To better understand how the post-9/11 state is reshaping American Islam, I examine the case of Muslim American dissident Tarek Mehanna, sentenced to seventeen years in prison in 2012 for providing material support for terrorism. I read Mehanna's verbal and visual depictions of his persecution in relation to the American dissidents Mehanna claims as intellectual predecessors, above all Henry David Thoreau and John Brown, while situating this dissent within a long history of American activism

Thomas Berger is best known for his western, Little Big Man, made into a film starring Dustin Hoffman, yet his Reinhart tetralogy is at least as important an achievement. Crazy in Berlin (1958), the first volume and the author's first novel, is a very ambitious work that captures postwar Berlin in telling detail. Based on Berger's experiences in the American Army during the occupation, the book displays his tragicomic vision of the human condition. The opening sections of the essay provide information about Berger's German American background while growing up in Cincinnati, a discussion of how Berger studied the political novels of his time to shape his craft, and a succinct account of the harrowing situation in postwar Berlin that Berger witnessed firsthand. Having established the most relevant contexts, the latter half of the essay provides an interpretation of the novel's central themes as well as an aesthetic evaluation of its merits as a work of fiction. While Crazy in Berlin is not without significant flaws, it is in the last analysis an impressively accomplished work, distinguished both by its memorable characters and by the author's philosophical depth. It deserves to be much better known as one of the most challenging works of his distinguished career.

This article examines a series of British travel documentaries on the American South made since 2008 which are representative of the way in which southern distinctiveness is maintained through television within a transatlantic context. The travelogues focus on historic racial struggles, southern food, and music, and frame the South as a distinctly historical space, where either historical moments obscure the contemporary South, or cultural continuity and resistance to change and modernity are celebrated. The article also discusses the similarities between the travelogues and the southern tourist industry, and how transatlantic “televisual tourism” works against the wider scholarly challenge to southern exceptionalism.

The eve of World War II saw the development of direct connections between public relations experts and issues of foreign affairs in the United States. Public relations professionals assisted both internationalists and noninterventionists to spread their arguments across the nation, helping them to hone their messages, to organize, and to raise money. All of the main citizens’ organizations created during this period sought public relations assistance in the face of growing popular awareness of global events, and with an awareness of the need for public relations counsel in the face of an increasingly measurable concept of public opinion.

Scholars rank Franklin D. Roosevelt as a great President, and Hollywood agrees. During his presidency and in the decades that followed, Roosevelt appeared in various film and television productions, emerging as an idealized leader who overcomes physical disability, inspires the public, and pursues wise policies. The origins of, reasons behind, and manifestations of this tenaciously consistent image are the subject of this article. The process began with FDR's own successful leadership and media (including film) savvy. It was sustained by the influence of Roosevelt's family and admirers in the entertainment industry. It seldom has been challenged, even as portraits of FDR widened across of a variety of film and television genres from the 1970s onward.

In Joan C. Williams's White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America and Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, the reader will find a nation riven by abiding class prejudice. Both have written explicitly with the goal of forcing readers to confront the deep, ugly, and ultimately destructive effects of elite snobbery towards working-class or impoverished white people. They both believe that educated readers tend to minimize or ignore how much class matters and has mattered in American history and to deny their own class biases; these books are meant to make that denial harder to sustain.