Oscars are amusing, Olympics are fun, but for a good solid laugh, give me the competition for the Diagram Prize, the award presented annually to the Oddest Book Title of the Year. The shortlist of nominees for this year’s prize, which has been awarded for the past 32 years by the British trade publication The …
The most necessary story of the young year is Jane Mayer’s article in the most recent issue of The New Yorker. It’s called The Trail, and it very carefully picks through the discussion about what legal powers we can bring to bear terrorists like the Underpants Bomber and the other dangerous individuals whom we have …
In 2008 a young poet named T.A. Noonan conducted interviews with Stacy Morrison, who is the editor-in-chief of Redbook, and with me, in my capacity as Managing Editor of Playboy, on the topic of fiction in magazines. Ms. Noonan has run the results on her website, which is called Delirious Hem. The results, I think, …
Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks. I believe this deserves three vas and a voom.
There was a fascinating story in The Telegraph last week about a new book and a new film in France that alleges that the legenday novelist Alexander Dumas, left, author of The Three Muskateers and The Count of Monte Christo and other fabulous, fantastic stories of the 18th and 19th century, benefited enormously from having …
Maybe it was all the snow, but whatever the reason, yesterday produced an unusually bounteous crop of sex news. In an article in The New York Times on the connection between food and sexual arousal, reporter Sarah Kershaw discussed a study conducted by the Smell and Taste Research Foundation in Chicago. “In one small experiment …
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 …