Trawling through photo albums last week, I found these wonderful pictures. Left, Kurt and Kate Andersen; above, George Kalogerakis, Rachel Urquhart, Spike and Graydon Carter. Below left, Molly Malanowski and me. These three photos were taken in 1989 at Kurt’s place in Putnam County. Below right, Molly, earlier that same year, in our apartment in …
I just finished an awfully good debut novel by a young writer named Thomas Leveritt called The Exchange-Rate Between Love and Money. The book takes place among a group of international expatriates who have come to Sarajevo in the still-shaky aftermath of the conflict in the nineties. Quick-buck artists, soldiers of fortune, peacekeepers, international aid …
Several years ago, I had a conversation with the political commentator Jeff Greenfield about how the personal appearance of candidates affects elections. Most of our conversation focused on facial hair, and its almost total disappearance among political candidates, especially among those for national or state-wide office. Jeff thought the fashion against facial hair would be …
That fine old sixties exclamation “That was wild!” has never been particularly useful to me; I always found it vague. Well, never has it seemed more perfect than in describing Inglourious Basterds, the new film by Quentin Tarantino. It is wild! Funny, tense, violent, exciting–it’s really enormously entertaining. In some ways, it’s even more entertaining …