Max Bernstein, the younger son of Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, is now a protest singer. He formed the band Max and the Marginalized a little over a month ago, and he now posts songs—they’re about subjects like the death penalty and White House press secretary Dana Perino—on the Huffington Post every week. (Sample lyric: “Dana Dana, there’s something special in the way you de-emphasize / I see the burning bodies in your pretty blue eyes.”) He once worked for Huffington, and his mother blogs for the site. “I personally don’t feel particularly oppressed,” he admits, and he probably shouldn’t—his other band, the Actual, just put out a record and played the Warped Tour. But he’s motivated. “These are not good times for America,” he says, “just like 1968 was not good times for America.” And he’s disappointed with the current state of protest rock. “Rage Against the Machine was probably the most important political band of the past couple decades,” he says. “But did we really need them in the nineties? Now there’s not much going on, and most of it is just, like, ‘Bush is a Fascist’ over some power chords.”

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Related:

• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Rebecca Milzoff
• Table of Contents: Nov 12, 2007 issue of New York | Subscribe!