As much as it pains me to admit it, the awful Ann Coulter made an apt point some years ago when she criticized liberals for calling Republicans dumb. She ran through a list of presidents that she said liberals smugly labeled as stupid–Ike, Ford, Reagan, George W. Bush–none of whom were. More to the point, …
On Sunday Ginny and I went to the Burns Center for a big screen viewing of what has been one of her longtime favorites, Gone With the Wind. I had seen the film the view times, and it was never one of my favorites. But the critic and historian Molly Haskell (pictured at right, with …
Last Wednesday, the sports pages of The New York Times had two wonderful anecdotes, one about managerial leadership, and one about the art of negotiation. In the first, by William C. Rhoden, Emerson Boozer, a star running back on the Super Bowl II-winning Jets, told a story about the key role played by the team’s …
The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, by Duquesne law professor Ken Gormley, appears more than a decade after the sex-and-real estate scandal called Whitewater ebbed out, but even though Gormley does a fine job in retelling the tale, by the time the reader wades through the nearly 700 pages of bad judgments and …
I’m a little surprised by the wave of acclaim that has buoyed Game Change onto the top of the bestsellers’ list. The book was written by Mark Halperin, whose excellent work a few years ago on ABC News’s The Note revolutionized political coverage, and by John Heileman. Halperin now writes for Time; Heilemann, for New …
J.D. Salinger, whom Stephen King today rightfully called “the last of the great post-World War II novelists,” died Thursday in New Hampshire at 91. Most people played up the legacy of The Catcher in the Rye, its great teenage narrator, its definitive postwar voice, its eternal first sentence (“If you really want to hear about …
“I don’t believe the American people want us to focus on our job security, they want us to focus on their job security,” President Obama said at his face-off with Republican members of the House yesterday. In fact, one of the keys to getting Washington focus on our job security, and any and all other …
My friend Steve Lovelady died on January 15. He and I worked together at Time in 1997 and 1998, and although I didn’t have a lot of interaction with him, I found him to smart, decent, tough but low-key, enormously effective, a top-notch editor. And in fact, he was the one who sent me along …
I’m doing some work for Nielsen IAG this week at an office located on Park Avenue South at 26th Street. We’re on the western half of the block; on the east, as I discovered today, is the 69th Regiment Armory, home of New York’s Fighting 69th, and these days, the 165th Infantry Regiment of the …
You can’t say a bad word about Peyton Manning. The very model of the modern managerial quarterback is as heroically cool as the statue of him that the Hoosiers will no doubt erect in front of their football palace the day after he retires. But Manning, like Joe Montana, like Bob Griese, is the kind …