A wholly personal and entirely idiosyncratic ranking of the what were the very best elements of what, apart from these and a few other gems, was a beast of year: 1.) London. A full week living the life of a roving journalist, enjoying posh circumsances, a limitless credit line, and the company of smart, thoughtful …
On thenation.com, we wonder: how well do you remember the year to come? 1. 2010’s highest-rated TV program was: A. The Apprentice Gets a Shot at Love, in which the member of a talk show’s production staff vie to be selected as the host’s mistress. B. American Death Panel, in which judges Simon Cowell, Michelle …
David Levine, the peerless caricaturist, died yesterday at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Here’s Bruce Weber, writing in the Times: David Levine, whose macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates were the visual trademark of The New York Review of Books for nearly half a century, died …
Yesterday my sister Rose Marie drove up from Maryland for a post-Christmas visit. We had a very fine time, playing Guitar Hero, looking at some of dad’s old slides, continuing our holiday of overeating at Mughal Palace in Hawthorne, and going to the late show of Avatar in 3D at the City Center Imax in …
We had a swell time the day after Christmas by hydroplaning down to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx and joining the gang for dinner at Dominick’s. The always-crowded family style restaurant had long been one of favorite haunts, and though Ginny and I had not eaten there for ten years or so, we had spent …
TMZ has posted this photo purportedly showing JFK on a boat full of naked women. The article details how TMZ received verification from photo experts who conformed that the print was made on paper consistent with the late fifties, that the damage to the print was consistent with processes of the day, that there are …
The usual Christmas Eve gang evidenced some new tricks the home of Cathy Gallagher and Tim Hart, pulling out the old chestnut, charades. Smooth Criminal. Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. Avatar. The Audacity of Hope. Going Rogue. Tiger Woods. Up. Smiles all around. UP: Greg and Susan; …
Showing how sometimes shockingly ignorant I am, I had never heard of Hank Stuever until The Washington Monthly asked me to review his new book, Tinsel. It turns out that Stuever is a very popular writer for The Washington Post, and that Tinsel is, and here I quote myself, “a stylishly written and often delightful …
According to a new book by a professor at Duquesne University Law School, Osama bin Laden tried to assassinate President Bill Clinton during a 1996 visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the Philippines. This is something of a scoop, for although Ramzi Yousef confessed to plotting the assassination of Clinton in the …
And so now, after months of tedious, tendentious argument, after riotous town meetings and the hysteria over non-existent death squads, after the Palin moment and the Lieberman moment, passage of historic legislation a hair’s breadth away, and here comes Howard Dean to say that the whole thing isn’t worth a damn thing. Bag it, says …