LOOSEN UP, DAVE BABY!
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 PURDUM’S JOURNALISTIC HOWLER
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 …
JOE QUEENAN’S MASTERFUL MEMOIR
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 …
THE LESSON OF PALIN, THE LESSON OF QUAYLE
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 …
“NOMME, PRONOMME, OCCUPATION”
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 …
JAGUAR!
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, …
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SUSAN!
Our friend Susan Schmidt celebrated her 50th birthday the other night, and many lobster-loving friends and family members showed up at a lovely restaurant in Croton whose name I forget to mark the occasion. It was a lot of fun.
DIA BEACON
Ginny and I spent Sunday in Beacon at the Dia art gallery, looking at the gigantic installations of conceptual modern art. Neither of us much liked or understood what was going on with the piles of sand or stacks of carpets or big holes in the floor, although both of us, and Ginny especially, liked …
ROGUE INVESTIGATOR!
Three cheers for my friend and former Esquire colleague Michael Gross for his new book Rogues’ Gallery, a smashing expose of all the secrets that reside behind the masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the fascinating swells Michael’s very entertaining expose brings back are General Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the first director of …