When I was an editor at Spy a couple of decades ago, we used to run an item called The Spy List, which was almost invariably a simple set of names that were connected by–well, that was for the reader to figure out, or to speculate upon. Basically it was a way we could print …
Ginny and I spent a pleasant hour Monday night watching the HBO documentary about the Philadelphia Flyers of the mid-seventies, the famous Broad Street Bullies, whose adventures Ginny and I much enjoyed. Indeed, some of the footage was a little like seeing home movies. The famous fog game in the Cup Finals in 1975? That …
Peter O’Donnell, who created the comic strip Modesty Blaise for the London Evening Standard in 1963 and who chronicled her adventures for the next 38 years, died over the weekend at age 90. O’Donnell began writing comic strips when he was 17, a nascent career that was interrupted by a stint in the army during …
Does anyone else see the irony in the head of the world’s largest surveillance state meeting his destruction in front of an open mic? Let’s face it, for all the commentary about how Gordon Brown’s harsh comments about a 65 year-old housewife revealed the inner man, what he was mostly guilty of was venting. Struggling …
In yesterday’s Times, the estimable scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. had an odd op-ed article entitled “Ending the Slavery Blame Game. ” What made it odd was its construction. At the heart of the piece was Gates’ very interesting summary of recent scholarship about the complicity of African tribes in capturing African people and selling …
SLAVERY REPARATIONS: THE BILL HAS BEEN PAID, IN BLOOD Read More »
Sorry to be so late to the party, but I was reading something the other day that placed Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell‘s discussion of slavery and Virginia and the Civil War of a couple of weeks ago in particularly sharp relief. You’ll recall that as a sop to the Sons of Confederate War Veterans, McDonnell …
Last Sunday, the Briarcliff Committee for the Arts had its second in a series of authors’ readings. My friends Joe Queenan and Giulia Melucci participated, and I was very pleased to be able to introduce them. Joe from his excellent memoir Closing Time, an often hilarious, more frequently harrowing account of his upbringing in a …
At about 2:30 this afternoon, an out-of-control panel truck full of bottles of juice rear-ended a Briarcliff school bus at the intersection of Route 100 and Chappaqua Road, about a mile from the house. Thankfully, it seems no one was badly hurt. I took these pictures. Later I sent the to The Gazette. We’ll see …
Congratulations to Lisa Birnbach, a colleague from Spy and a collaborator from Loose Lips, whose resurrection of her mega-successful The Official Preppie Handbook in the eighties earned her a front page article in The New York Times on Saturday. That’s Lisa in the center, talking to the famous designer and Batman buff Chip Kidd, and …
Just in time for tax season comes the report in yesterday’s New York Times that the top 25 hedge fund investors earned a collective $25.3 billion (with a B) in 2009. This includes seven who earned more than $1 billion, one of whom, David Tepper of Pittsburgh (pictured), earned a record $4 billion. “We bet …
WHY AREN’T WE TAXING THE SNOT OUT THE HEDGE FUND MANAGERS? Read More »