A speaking tour that took Paul Krugman from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Westchester Community College brought him yesterday to the New York Times Center opposite the McDonald’s on West 41st Street, for a “Sunday with the Magazine’’ interview with assistant managing editor Gerald Marzorati. In front of a packed house of several hundred …
There’s a new spirit loose in the land. Call it Abolishomania. Maybe it’s part of a growing trend. Perhaps once you get rid of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, profligate bonuses and expense account conferences and start thinking about a world without Chysler and The New York Times, a certain bloodlust rises to the fore, and …
There was a moment on D-Day, related in Cornelius Ryan’s great history The Longest Day, when American troops landing on Utah beach discovered they had disembarked their landing craft in the wrong place, at a point significantly removed from the planned point of attack. Surrounded by confused and anxious captains, Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the …
Writing on TrueSlant.com last week, I observed that the Number 2 book on amazon.com was Eduardo Galeano‘s Open Veins of Latin America, a book about America’s involvement in Latin America first published in 1997. To what did Galeano owe his sudden surge into best-sellerdom? Why, simply, to a genius act of product placement on the …
Thanks to the largesse of my friend David Jensen, I got a chance to see Citi Field, the new home of the New York Mets. Compared to old, dingy, dank, smelly Shea Stadium, which every day of the last ten years seemed less and less like a major league ball park, Citi Field is a …
Last week Ginny and I went to the Jacob Burns Center to see The Graduate, and also to hear Mark Harris discuss his book Pictures at a Revolution. The book focuses on the five films that were nominated for Best Picture in the watershed year of 1968–The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of …
In June we will welcome a new comic book, Barack the Barbarian: Quest for the Treasure of Stimuli. Barack the Barbarian? Did you see him at the White House Easter Egg Hunt yesterday? Here are two images that have been released. Is that supposed to be Hank Paulson behind Obama? Is that Michelle or, like, …
Although every year April brings the start of baseball season and tax season, this year the two events seem more commingled than coincidental. In New York, two new taxpayer-subsidized stadiums are opening. One, the home of the New York Mets, is Citi Field, Citicorp having bought the naming rights back before the crash, when its …
Ginny and I took a ride out to Oyster Bay New York this morning to visit Sagamore Hill, the home of Theodore Roosevelt, his wife Edith and the six Roosevelt children. A beautiful estate, although hardly ostentatious by the standards of his day, let alone ours. I enjoyed seeing his house, although there were waaaaaay …
I’ve never been much for looking back, but the deaths of my dad and of Jack Grady last summer have made me a bit more respectful of the need to acknowledge the people who’ve been important in my life. Last Friday (April 3), I went back to LaSalle (a College when I was there, now …