CAROLS AT THE OPERA HOUSE
Since September Cara has been singing with the Lubin Singers, a group of talented vocalists under the direction of Susan Lubin. Last night at Susan’s beautiful home (which she calls The Opera House) we saw the fruits of their efforts. They sang a program of carols that was very lovely, and Susan laid out an …
SHOES IN THE NEWS
Muntadhar al-Zeidi, a 28-year-old unmarried Shiite reporter from a minor TV station, hurled a pair of shoes at President Bush to protest the U.S. military occupation of Iraq. “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” he said as he threw the first shoe. “This is from the widows, …
I SAW MOMMY KISSING SANTA CLAUS VON STAFFENBERG
The holiday movie season is upon up. No, I don’t mean Four Christmases and Nothing Like the Holidays and the endless broadcasts of It’s A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. I’m talking about Valkyrie, the movie about the attempted assassination of Hitler, and The Spirit, Frank Miller’s blood-saturated comic book adaptation, and of …
HEAR, HEAR!
Three cheers for Tina Brown! In her column in The Daily Beast this past week, she nailed the media business’s problem on the head: “The carnage in media jobs accelerated last week with hundreds getting whacked at Viacom, NBC, Time Inc., and my own esteemed publisher Doubleday. . . . We’re in the middle of …
OH, THE IRONY!
I know, I know, I’m way behind on this, but I just heard about the report in The New York Post‘s Page Six in late November that Ann Coulter has broken her jaw, and has had it wired shut. Is no one afraid that we risk the creation of a black hole when she implodes?
ALL THAT ENDS WELL ISN’T WELL
Day after day, drip after drip, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough wages a low-key but relentless campaign to make us believe that the presidency of George W. Bush wasn’t all that bad. One morning this past week, Scarborough advanced the idea that the Bush presidency could be divided into three sections: the part after 9/11, for which …
TALKING SNOWBALL WITH ALICE SCHROEDER
For years, the financial writer Alice Schroeder had urged Warren Buffet to write his autobiography. Buffet continually demurred, and then countered with a question: why don’t you write a biography. He offered her full access to himself and to his papers, and encouraged his family and associates to cooperate, without, importantly, exerting any sort of …
SAD SADDAM
You’d think that HBO, the network that for seven seasons gave us a perfectly pitched story of the personal and professional life of a criminal monster, would have done a better job with the story of Saddam Hussein, but House of Saddam, a four-part miniseries that begins airing Sunday, disappoints. The son of an interfering …
WHY OBAMA SHOULD GROW A BEARD
Here is a piece I published this morning on The Daily Beast. Click on the link to see their fabulous slide show. “I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Lincoln,” President-elect Barack Obama told 60 Minutes recently. “There is a wisdom there and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was …