I’d never read the memoir of anyone I actually know until I read Closing Time, the account of my friend Joe Queenan of his upbringing in Philadelphia. Joe, for those of you who don’t know, is a very funny writer who contributed many wonderful articles to Spy and other magazines (including a hilarious piece for …
Writing in The New York Times today, Ross Douthat looks at Sarah Palin‘s weird resignation, mounts the germ of an idea, and rides like the wind: Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion …
Ginny and I saw Z at the Burns yesterday. Such a brilliant movie–fabulous acting, tremendous direction by Costas Gavras. The quiet, firm intensity of Jean Louis Trintignant as the honest judge is piercing (the way he demands “Nomme, pronomme, occupation” from the exalted commanders of the gendarmarie is to behold justice made flesh), and the …
Someone at the venerable British automobile company Jaguar–someone no doubt not destined for a long career in sales or marketing–thought it shrewd to invite an unemployed editor to come up to the Monticello Motor Club in, appropriately, Monticello NY, to preview the 2010 high performance XFR and XKR. Their weakness, however, is not my problem, …
Our friend Susan Schmidt celebrated her 50th birthday the other night, and many lobster-loving friends and family members showed up at a lovely restaurant in Croton whose name I forget to mark the occasion. It was a lot of fun.
Ginny and I spent Sunday in Beacon at the Dia art gallery, looking at the gigantic installations of conceptual modern art. Neither of us much liked or understood what was going on with the piles of sand or stacks of carpets or big holes in the floor, although both of us, and Ginny especially, liked …
Three cheers for my friend and former Esquire colleague Michael Gross for his new book Rogues’ Gallery, a smashing expose of all the secrets that reside behind the masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the fascinating swells Michael’s very entertaining expose brings back are General Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the first director of …
The world–well, a small subset of the world–gathered in Washington Square Park yesterday for World Science Day. Actually kind of an underwhelming event, but it was nice to spend an afternoon in Greenwich Village with Ginny and the girls.
Three cheers for my pal A.J. Baime, whose new book Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans is in bookstores now. A.J. does a great job telling the story of the rivalry in the sixties between Ferrari, the dominant racing power, and the upstart Ford Motor Company, …
Here’s today’s innovative idea, from Newsweek: Hire a comedian to edit the magazine, which happens to be a Tina Brown brainstorm from 1995 (she hired Roseanne Barr to edit The New Yorker), and sell the concept with Spy magazine cover concept, fresh from 1989. (By the way, that’s the head of Scott Yates doubling for …