In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Roger Angell offers his customary valediction to the baseball season–the year’s not over until Angell sings. Although he rightly singles out Johnny Damon‘s at-bat in the top of the ninth of Game Four as the pivotal moment of the series, the great Angell punts the description a …
House has been one of my favorite television shows lo these many years, in no small measure thanks to the contributions of Jennifer Morrison, who plays the very smart, very moral, very pretty Dr. Cameron. Well, it appears Cameron has been bid sayonara. In Tuesday’s episode she left the hospital, left her husband (the never …
Publishers’ Weekly has come out with its list of the ten best books of 2009. The fact that not one of the authors managed to be a woman would in itself require PW to do some energetic tap-dancing, but the fact that the single best book of the year has been written by a woman …
This is most minor footnote to what is, after all, a terribly large tragedy, but last week’s shootings at Fort Hood reminded us of a question that has long rattled around in our heads: why does the U.S. Army continue to maintain so many bases named after Confederate generals? Fort Hood is named after General …
“Provided that a character is smart enough and manipulative enough,” reads a post on tvtropes.org, “they can get the people around them to do just about anything. Sometimes this can be accomplished by the power of charisma, but other times it needs to be perpetrated through an elaborate scheme. This scheme takes into account everything …
A baseball season is a novel. At its heart is a cast of characters–guys with hopes, goals, ambitions, problems, flaws, things to prove. The characters individually create a character that is a team, and over the course of the season, as the individuals succeed and fail and as the team succeeds and fail, dramas are …
I have always admired the sculptures of Augustus Saint Gaudens, and whether it was going to Rangers-Flyers games at Madison Square Garden where I saw Diana, or my interest in the Civil War which led me to Boston to see the monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, or my early public …
Congratulations to Hank Rosenfeld, my friend and former colleague from Spy, who collaborated on The Wicked Wit of the West, which is a memoir-cum-biography of the great Hollywood screenwriter Irving Brecher, the author of two Marx Brothers movies (At the Circus and Go West), Meet Me in St. Louis, and Bye Bye Birdie!, and who …
Let us now praise Johnny Damon, the ballplayer’s ballplayer, the crucial man in last night’s 7-4 Yankee win. In the first, he doubled and scored; in the fifth, he doubled and drove in a run; and in the ninth, he won the game. With two out in a 4-4 game that the Phillies had just …
Mailer, Buckley, Hunter Thompson–with so many of the literary lions of the era having passed away, it’s always welcome when one of the survivors speaks. Gore Vidal has an interview on theatlantic.com, and it’s pure enjoyment. Not profound, but cranky, perverse, unkind, witty, charming; rather like listening to a very indiscreet grand signeur. Below, an …