Last week Ginny and I went to the Jacob Burns Center to see The Graduate, and also to hear Mark Harris discuss his book Pictures at a Revolution. The book focuses on the five films that were nominated for Best Picture in the watershed year of 1968–The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of …
In June we will welcome a new comic book, Barack the Barbarian: Quest for the Treasure of Stimuli. Barack the Barbarian? Did you see him at the White House Easter Egg Hunt yesterday? Here are two images that have been released. Is that supposed to be Hank Paulson behind Obama? Is that Michelle or, like, …
Although every year April brings the start of baseball season and tax season, this year the two events seem more commingled than coincidental. In New York, two new taxpayer-subsidized stadiums are opening. One, the home of the New York Mets, is Citi Field, Citicorp having bought the naming rights back before the crash, when its …
Ginny and I took a ride out to Oyster Bay New York this morning to visit Sagamore Hill, the home of Theodore Roosevelt, his wife Edith and the six Roosevelt children. A beautiful estate, although hardly ostentatious by the standards of his day, let alone ours. I enjoyed seeing his house, although there were waaaaaay …
I’ve never been much for looking back, but the deaths of my dad and of Jack Grady last summer have made me a bit more respectful of the need to acknowledge the people who’ve been important in my life. Last Friday (April 3), I went back to LaSalle (a College when I was there, now …
This morning The New York Post appears with an unbelievable cover story-literally unbelievable. Headlined (at least online) as “AXED GALS TAKE POLE POSITIONS: Pros Stripping Amid Wall St. $lump”, the article by Anka Radakovich (one time sex columnist for Details magazine) reports “Scores of professional New York women stripped of their six-figure jobs are now …
Last week I went to a screening of Steve Solderbergh‘s new film The Girlfriend Experience, an interestingly made film about a not very interesting Manhattan call girl. Today, I received an email from, I presume, a publicist for the film: Good morning – below is a note to you from Steven Soderbergh about the 3/18 …
Whatever else anybody says, the real reason why nobody at Treasury pulled the plug on the AIG bonuses is simple: nobody thought the sums were truly outrageous or that the practice was completely outside the norm. Sometime over the last ten days, of course, everyone became a virgin again and proclaimed shock at the amount …
In his fascinating new book Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Liaquat Ahamed pulls off the rare accomplishment of looking into a lost world and finding lessons for our own. Lords of Finance focuses on the central bankers who oversaw the economies of the world’s four most important powers in the days …
In case you missed it, Jon Stewart‘s merciless evisceration of Wall Street and CNBC on The Daily Show was a sight to behold. Someone could have stopped this fight in around the fifth minute, but I’m glad they didn’t.