By the end of the week, we will embark on the 40th anniversary of one of the most amazingly newsworthy months of our history. July 16th, of course, is the anniversary of the day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first me to walk on the moon. Two days after that, …
The word novel may seldom be more aptly applied to a book than it can be to Jed Mercurio‘s new book American Adulterer. After all, John F. Kennedy is not exactly a figure who has lacked for attention or interpretation, but Mercurio, a British doctor and novelist, has developed a unique approach that truly makes …
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It was one of those good days, a mood changer. Went down to Chelsea to sign some papers for Joe Cilibrasi, and then decided to grab some lunch in a barbecue joint, and right at the next table was my friend Sharon Jautz, the former head of HR at Playboy, now blonde and tan and …
I love David Brooks. He is so wise, and temperate, and fair-minded, and even-handed. And reasonable. There may not be a more reasonable man tapping a keyboard in America today. Every time I read one of his columns, I feel a warm, gentle, reasonable arm around my shoulder, gently guiding me towards the path of …
Todd S. Purdum is an accomplished reporter with a long string of successes, and his feature on Sarah Palin in the August issue of Vanity Fair, “It Came From Wasilla,” certainly constitutes a bright new pelt on his pony. But deep in the article, well past the jump, there is a swampy passage that I’m …
I’d never read the memoir of anyone I actually know until I read Closing Time, the account of my friend Joe Queenan of his upbringing in Philadelphia. Joe, for those of you who don’t know, is a very funny writer who contributed many wonderful articles to Spy and other magazines (including a hilarious piece for …
Writing in The New York Times today, Ross Douthat looks at Sarah Palin‘s weird resignation, mounts the germ of an idea, and rides like the wind: Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion …
Ginny and I saw Z at the Burns yesterday. Such a brilliant movie–fabulous acting, tremendous direction by Costas Gavras. The quiet, firm intensity of Jean Louis Trintignant as the honest judge is piercing (the way he demands “Nomme, pronomme, occupation” from the exalted commanders of the gendarmarie is to behold justice made flesh), and the …
Someone at the venerable British automobile company Jaguar–someone no doubt not destined for a long career in sales or marketing–thought it shrewd to invite an unemployed editor to come up to the Monticello Motor Club in, appropriately, Monticello NY, to preview the 2010 high performance XFR and XKR. Their weakness, however, is not my problem, …