In The Washington Post last Sunday, the social scientist Charles Murray wrote one of those uncommon articles that manages to intrigue and infuriate all at once. Murray’s thesis is that the America’s elite is out of touch with “the real America.” Writes Murray, “We know, for one thing, that the New Elite clusters in a …
According to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Marvin Olasky of the Christian magazine World, has a new interview with former GOP House majority leader Dick Armey (below) in which the Texas Republican and Tea Party Svengali says that Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton would “bond” over wine and cigars while sharing stories about their …
The illustrator Zina Saunders is the daughter of Norm Saunders, the prolific illustrator whose work first captivated me in the early sixties when I bought my first pack of the strangely gripping Mars Attacks! cards. Zina has turned out to be a pretty wonderful political caricaturist. As you can see form the cover of the …
In 1998, when I was editing the Notebook section of Time, I had to find someone to compose a 300 word eulogy for Tammy Wynette, the great country singer who had died that week. I decided to approach a fledgling short story writer named Roseanne Cash; of course, it didn’t hurt that Cash was a …
Repatriated Russian spy Anna Chapman, posing for Mucovite Maxim. In the immortal words of The Beatles: Show me around your snow-peaked mountains way down south Take me to your daddy’s farm Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out Come and keep your comrade warm I’m back in the USSR Hey you don’t know how lucky …
In The Guardian, Rick Gekoski elegantly makes the point that literary culture is disappearing. “Supposing that we were back in the year 1974, and playing a game of Humiliation (later made popular in David Lodge‘s Changing Places) in which you earn points by naming books that you haven’t read and which you think the other …
Our old dog Vicki has been spending a lot of time on the lawn by herself. She did this a bit over the summer, but not this much, and never in her younger years. It’s an awfully nice day here, and we have a canine house guest that Vicki can’t stand. But we’re concerned that …
My cousin Stephanie Bauman sent this to me. It’s a kind of a test (an ungraded one) that evaluates if you’re really from Baltimore (or, to be more precise, if you’re really from Baltimore and from a certain era–mostly the 1950s and 1960s.) You could only buy a Volvo from Michaelson Motors on Reisterstown Rd, …
At the start of the financial crisis in 2007, my friend Chris Napolitano noted that the from the public’s point of view, the Indispensable Man had taken himself out of the battle. He was talking about Eliot Spitzer, whose work as Attorney General in exposing misdeeds on Wall Street certainly had certainly positioned him as …