Finally got around to reading Jane Mayer‘s excellent article in the October 27th issue of The New Yorker in which she reports on how Sarah Palin came to be selected as John McCain‘s running mate. She says that one of the key moments came when one of her backers realized that The Weekly Standard and …
If you’ve never received a note that begins “You have never stopped being brilliant,” let me tell you, I recommend it. The other day, the writer Lynn Phillips sent me note saying “You have never stopped being brilliant, but I’m still haunted by your June 91 Spy piece, `When Disney Ran America,’ and keep wanting …
A stranger comes up to you at a bar or in a train station and starts to tell you a story. How long do you last? Five minutes? Could you tolerate him for ten minutes without looking at your watch? How about ninety? Impossible. And yet seven times a week at Greenwich Village’s Barrow Street …
Last July, when Christopher Ciccone published his gosspy memoir Life With My Sister Madonna, I paged through it to see if I would be mentioned. Not because of that torrid romance Madonna and I had when I was one of her back-up dancers–that was really just a big rumor–but because in the summer of 1993, …
Congratulations to my friend Paul Lindstrom. Paul is a SVP at Nielsen Strategic Research, and he was just ranked Number 23 on Mediaweek‘s list of the Fifty Most Indispensible Executives Shaping the Future of Media. Here’s what the magazine said: “A 30-year Nielsen vet responsible for its first services for measuring cable, Lindstrom has become …
Got the bad news that thanks to huge deficits, Playboy and I will be going our separate ways. Too bad. I enjoyed my job and the people I worked with. But onward and upward. (Above, I say goodbye to my friend Joseph DeAcetis, who lost his job as Fashion Director. Joseph and I first worked …
Thanks to my friend Derek Alger, I was able to have lunch on Wednesday with Thomas Fleming, the very distinguished historian and novelist. Tom is the author of The Illusion of Victory, Duel, Washington’s Secret War, The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee, and the just published The Perils of Peace, about the struggles the …
Thanks to LinkedIn, I’ve heard from two more friends from LaSalle. My very first college roommate, Dennis O’Dowd, sent me a hilarious letter. “I was just using you as an example the other day. My mother sent me an email which detailed all of Obama‘s past foreign and/or suspicious associations and how this proved he …
Grim article about the state of book publishing by Leon Neyfakh in The New York Observer: “Think of it like a supply chain,” said one publishing executive who would not speak for attribution. “If the newspapers have fewer ads, they’re running fewer book reviews, so therefore, for those books that don’t have a pre-estab- lished …
Ginny and I had a splendid time on Sunday watching Cara compete in the Peekskill Rotary Horse Show. It was the first inter-stable competition for Cara (and only her second overall), and the first for her horse Cade. Both did very well. It was a great treat to spend a beautiful day in the sun, …