With the final class of my course in Magazine Writing at Marymount Manhattan College last night, I concluded my debut effort as a teacher. It was an enjoyable experience–certainly enjoyable enough that I’ll do it again next year. Thanks to the students who showed up and participated most enthusiastically for the last two months, including …
Yesterday I ran into my friend Larry Doyle on the corner of 42nd and Sixth. Larry said he had came to New York because he “just had to get out of Baltimore for a day.” Of course, I did that 36 years ago and never really returned, so perhaps someone should check to see if …
What should we make of Losing Mum and Pup, Christopher Buckley’s memoir of the that brief, less than a year-long period when both of his brilliant, charismatic parents fell ill and died? It is warm, affectionate, respectful, appropriately laudatory, and often quite moving. But it is also frank to point of indiscretion (some say past …
As Clive Owen put it in the brilliant last line of Children of Men, “What a day!” It started (late) with a very fine lunch at Bar American (the old Judson Grill at Seventh and 52nd) with my old and dear friend from Spy days, John Connolly, now a contributor to Vanity Fair, and his …
I met my pal Duane Swierczynski at a pub on East 36th Street yesterday (he picked the place, called The Ginger Man, because it was a.) good and b.) the unofficial hangout of his pals at Marvel Comics, which are two fine reasons, although it meant passing up the chance to visit the bar’s compellingly …
There was a time when a literary-minded soul could go into a Barnes & Noble anywhere in this great nation and buy him/herself a canvas tote bag that had been emblazoned with the likeness of Charles Dickens or George Eliot or Virginia Woolf or some other giant of letters. Now there is a new face …
Many, many thanks to A.J. Jacobs, my friend and former colleague at Entertainment Weekly, now a mainstay at Esquire and famous Oprah-appearing author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, who last Thursday visited the class in magazine writing that I teach at Marymount Manhattan College. A.J. talked about how he got his …
Hey, Richard Holbrooke! You’ve been a diplomat since 1962, you’ve been Ambassador to the UN, you negotiated the Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, you’ve been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize seven—count ‘em, seven—times—and right now you’re President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose Bureau of Tourism is, as I …
At “Sunday with the Magazine,’’ a program of interviews and panel discussions presented by The New York Times, five journalists who cover the Obama administration for the paper offered some reasonably sharp observations on the president’s first 103 days. HOW’S IT GOING? “This has been a pretty tremendous period,’’ said Matt Bai, who regularly writes …
Caught on a rain-drenched Sunday with hours to kill between presentations at the Times, I visited the Met. I didn’t mean to hit the Arms and Armor gallery, but suddenly there I was. I looked around in memory of my friend Bob Carroll. I like to think that some of his work is still on …