Bernard-Henri Levy looks pretty much like you'd expect: a rail-thin Frenchman with a rather dashing coif of hair, who walked to the podium at Town Hall last night wearing a designer suit with his white dress shirt unbuttoned down to the navel (his signature), like a rock star looking to get his (mostly salt-and-pepper haired) groupies' panties in a twist. And in France, where Levy is a star of gossip pages, known only as "BHL," he is something of a rock star. But Levy is also a leading public intellectual who came to prominence in the late 1970s as a anti-Communist liberal and, in contrast to most of the European Left, a leading supporter of Israel. more ›

, Žižek, occasionally derided as nothing more than a party-line Stalinist, has achieved the unthinkable: he's made the philosopher a rock star. Andy Warhol would be proud. Tonight at Town Hall, he speaks about violence. more ›