Had an interesting change-of-pace day yesterday courtesy of Smart Box, an eight year-old French firm that is coming to the US. Smart Box is in the business of selling gift experiences–instead of buying a friend a scarf or a tie or the usual boring thing as a present, you can buy him or her an …
My friend Julie Mihaly, Spy‘s clever, creative photo editor in the Puck Building days and for a spell on Union Square as well, saw the photos I had posted on the blog here and here and here and here, and decided to do some local photo research–local, like in her own photo albums–to see what …
In what is apt to the first of many items published in conenction with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, The New York Times today published two articles about John Brown, marking the, yes, 150th anniversary of his hanging. The author Tony Horwitz eloquently writes of the striking parallels between Brown and the Islamist …
With no good option on Afghanistan available, it’s clear President Obama last night took the one he considered least bad–and by least bad, we mean the most likely to avoid the Worst Case Scenario. In the president’s case, that would be the “I told you so” scenario, the one that would become possible if America …
Beth Lomax Hawes, folklorist, member of the great Lomax family of musical anthropologists, member of the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, among others (that would be Beth in the photo below tucked into the upper right hand corner, above Pete, with Woody to her right), and most memorably, co-author of amusing song …
Time was you watched a TV drama, the whole thing got wrapped up in a hour. Perry Mason would meet a client, Dr. Kildare would get a case, Charlie would call the Angels, and sixty minutes later, everyone could go to bed. But in the eighties, things changed. In Wiseguy and Hill Street Blues and …
A couple of weeks ago in London, at a fundraiser for a prisoners’ rights organization Reprieve, the British writer Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy (better known in the US as The Golden Compass) unveiled an alternative Bible passage that suggested a different fate for Jesus. According to a report in …
Happy birthday Molly, 22 years old (okay, tomorrow.) Here’s a wish for a long life full of happiness, pretty girl. (Photo taken at the Cheesecake Factory in White Plains, where the four of us had a pleasant, overpriced dinner.)
Five years ago when I was at Jungle magazine, Ryan D’Agostino and I had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Cramer, who at the time was merely a smart, shrewd, excitable market commentator on CNBC, and not the self-caricaturing mad man of Mad Money. I had admired his memoir of his days as a hedge-fund operator, …
In Britain, Borders UK has gone into administration, as they call bankruptcy, and the other big chains, most notably Waterstone’s, are not asking for whom the bell tolls. Meanwhile, in the US, both Borders and Barnes & Noble both posted quarterly losses, and, according to the AP, both “forecast a difficult holiday season, saying competition …