Richard Goldstein in the Village Voice, October 9, 2001:

Consider the most immediate impact of the new conformity: the collapse of difference. Suddenly it seems like an act of impiety to point out that, in the phalanx of police and firefighters surrounding Giuliani on Saturday Night Live, there was hardly a black face to be seen. Or that, in the spectrum of opinion following this awful event, women were barely heard from, and so we were deprived of their perspective on the crisis. With some exceptions... female writers showed a far greater willingness to come to complex conclusions than their more powerful male colleagues. If women were fully included in the national dialogue, it wouldn't be such a monologue. We might be able to process our feelings without sedating the culture (and diminishing its capacity to spark new insights).

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