In Slate, Adam Kirsch begins his review of Samuel Johnson, Jeffrey Meyers‘ new biography, with this scary observation: If you get a group of writers together these days, you are guaranteed to hear a lot about death. Not just the deaths of once popular genres, like poetry or the literary novel; those reports have been …
Three cheers for Walter Kirn–the novelist, critic, and my friend and former colleague from Spy-–who slaps around David Denby in today’s New York Times Book Review in his review of Denby’s new book Snark: Denby pronounces Tom Wolfe and Maureen Dowd masters of “snarky mimesis” and settles on two epicenters of snark located on opposite …
Writing in The Guardian, the estimable journalist Barbara Ehrenreich tells an astonishing story: a man named Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian who was a British resident, has been held at Guantánamo, having been labeled a terrorist after confessing he had visited a ‘joke’ website on how to build a nuclear weapon. Mohamed says he admitted to …
My friend Pari Esfandiari sent me this link to a very cool photo with zoom capability. Just hold down the left button on the mouse and drag it to whatever area of the photo you wish to see more clearly. Amazingly, you can zoom right in on individual faces. What are you waiting for? Try …
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Cara (above red) and her longtime best friend Nadia Lindstrom (above blue) had their Sweet 16 party last night, and everyone had a terrific time. The girls looked beautiful, their friends were fun and well-behaved and enthusiastic, and the food was good (a tip of the chef’s toque to Donnie Alecci for deciding to use …
The very helpful Kevin Clack of the London Underground sent me pictures of me taken by CCTV cameras in the Whitehall Station of the Tube. In the photos, you can see Kevin and station manager Pete Bashford helpfully keeping an eye on me. In the top photo, Kevin is at far left, Pete is at …
Call it bad luck. President Obama gets passed a stimulus bill aimed to revive the economy, and Karl Rove says that what he’s really done is revive the GOP. Arguing in The Wall Street Journal that “sometime late this year or early next the economy’’ would have rebounded “on its own,’’ Rove contends that the …
Happy 200th birthday, Abe Lincoln. Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin. Now, I’m not really any good at math. I think it’s the reason I’ve never been able to finish Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein. Or understand magazine articles about card-counting. Or why, on those occasions when underwriters have explained mortgage amortization to me, all …
So here’s E.J. Dionne Jr.—a good guy, a reliable liberal—writing in this morning’s Washington Post: “The Obama administration keeps having to learn that bland centrism is not pragmatic, that it’s not helpful in resolving a big crisis and that it certainly doesn’t buy you any love.’’ And here’s David Ignatius, as smart a columnist as …
Is It the ‘Roids or the Records? I don’t like cheaters and I don’t like perjurers and I couldn’t care less if Alex Rodriguez spends the next nine years getting booed (if you’re sympathetic, envision Madonna giving him a nightly cuddle to soothe his bruised ego and saying “Now now, Alex, it will be all …