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 …
I am flattered that Boston blogger Brian Kane took a close interest in my Washington Monthly article on surveillance in the UK. He wasn’t entirely pleased–“I think Malanowski too readily dismisses the potential for significant abuse with the argument that there’s no centralization of all these surveillance systems at the moment,” he writes, and who …
In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Roger Angell offers his customary valediction to the baseball season–the year’s not over until Angell sings. Although he rightly singles out Johnny Damon‘s at-bat in the top of the ninth of Game Four as the pivotal moment of the series, the great Angell punts the description a …
House has been one of my favorite television shows lo these many years, in no small measure thanks to the contributions of Jennifer Morrison, who plays the very smart, very moral, very pretty Dr. Cameron. Well, it appears Cameron has been bid sayonara. In Tuesday’s episode she left the hospital, left her husband (the never …