I made my first acquaintance with George Scialabba's work under unfortunate circumstances. It was the fall of 1995, and a colleague e-mailed me to complain about Scialabba's review of Roger Kimball's and Hilton Kramer's Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the Twentieth Century , which had just appeared in these pages. My friend was stunned that Scialabba appeared to come down on the Dark Side of the culture wars: "In its crusade against the politicization of contemporary culture, the New Criterion is—on the whole, in the main, and not to put too fine a point on it—right." "Looks like the old Woody Allen joke has finally come to fruition," my snarky colleague said. " Dissent and Commentary have merged to form Dysentery ."