There was a time when a literary-minded soul could go into a Barnes & Noble anywhere in this great nation and buy him/herself a canvas tote bag that had been emblazoned with the likeness of Charles Dickens or George Eliot or Virginia Woolf or some other giant of letters. Now there is a new face …
Many, many thanks to A.J. Jacobs, my friend and former colleague at Entertainment Weekly, now a mainstay at Esquire and famous Oprah-appearing author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, who last Thursday visited the class in magazine writing that I teach at Marymount Manhattan College. A.J. talked about how he got his …
Hey, Richard Holbrooke! You’ve been a diplomat since 1962, you’ve been Ambassador to the UN, you negotiated the Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, you’ve been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize seven—count ‘em, seven—times—and right now you’re President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose Bureau of Tourism is, as I …
At “Sunday with the Magazine,’’ a program of interviews and panel discussions presented by The New York Times, five journalists who cover the Obama administration for the paper offered some reasonably sharp observations on the president’s first 103 days. HOW’S IT GOING? “This has been a pretty tremendous period,’’ said Matt Bai, who regularly writes …
Caught on a rain-drenched Sunday with hours to kill between presentations at the Times, I visited the Met. I didn’t mean to hit the Arms and Armor gallery, but suddenly there I was. I looked around in memory of my friend Bob Carroll. I like to think that some of his work is still on …
A speaking tour that took Paul Krugman from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Westchester Community College brought him yesterday to the New York Times Center opposite the McDonald’s on West 41st Street, for a “Sunday with the Magazine’’ interview with assistant managing editor Gerald Marzorati. In front of a packed house of several hundred …
There’s a new spirit loose in the land. Call it Abolishomania. Maybe it’s part of a growing trend. Perhaps once you get rid of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, profligate bonuses and expense account conferences and start thinking about a world without Chysler and The New York Times, a certain bloodlust rises to the fore, and …
There was a moment on D-Day, related in Cornelius Ryan’s great history The Longest Day, when American troops landing on Utah beach discovered they had disembarked their landing craft in the wrong place, at a point significantly removed from the planned point of attack. Surrounded by confused and anxious captains, Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the …
Writing on TrueSlant.com last week, I observed that the Number 2 book on amazon.com was Eduardo Galeano‘s Open Veins of Latin America, a book about America’s involvement in Latin America first published in 1997. To what did Galeano owe his sudden surge into best-sellerdom? Why, simply, to a genius act of product placement on the …
Thanks to the largesse of my friend David Jensen, I got a chance to see Citi Field, the new home of the New York Mets. Compared to old, dingy, dank, smelly Shea Stadium, which every day of the last ten years seemed less and less like a major league ball park, Citi Field is a …