Richard Zoglin, a former colleague of mine at Time magazine, has written an excellent piece of history of entertainment history called Comedy At The Edge, about stand-up comedy in the 1970s. Not only has Richard been a longtime observer of the stand-up scene, but he is a top-notch reporter, and the book captures the broad …
Clinton supporters spent the weekend accusing Obama of plaugerism. Obama supporters are already huffily warning superdelegates not to upset the will of the voters, as though Obama’s narrow lead at the two-thirds mark of the campaign is proof of what that will is. Both sides need to chill out and remind themselves that as tempting …
Listen to Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham rail against John McCain. Listen, and enjoy. It is the sound of the conservative crack-up. The great, long ,pro-market, anti-government, pro-military conservative run begun by Ronald Reagan has been bankrupted by George W. Bush, and these commentators are slowly realizing that they’ll very soon be part …
Schooled in football in Baltimore during the era of the peerless Unitas, I am properly reverential towards the special attributes of the great quarterbacks. And yet, over the years, it has been defensive players that I have found especially exciting–Rick Volk and Bobby Boyd, Mike Curtis, Jack Lambert and Jack Ham, Ronnie Lott, and the …
Here’s a little item that appeared earlier today on The Huffington Post: “In April 2005, police swarmed the U.S. Capitol to confront an erratic Australian man, carrying two suitcases, who they feared was a suicide bomber. After blowing up one of the bags, officers realized he was harmless. The police never noticed the two nervous …
Sometimes good things happen to good people. For a couple of years in the early nineties it was my good luck to work at Spy magazine and to sit in a cubicle located between cubicles occupied by two wonderful people, Joanne Gruber to the east, and Jim Collins to the west. Jim–funny, smart, unflinchingly decent, …
Had a lovely time today talking to Matthew Weiner, the Executive Producer of Mad Men, the most excellent AMC series. I was talking to Weiner for USA Weekend about The Apartment, the Billy Wilder classic now in a Collectors’ Edition DVD. Weiner was so smart and articulate about the film, and very generous with his …
I was thrilled to receive a note from my old friend from college Ron Hull, who had seen The Coup mentioned in LaSalle’s alumni notes. Ron, as it turns out, is Senior Counsel at Underberg & Kessler, a law firm in Rochester NY, where he specializes environmental law. In 2007, Ron was named by Law …
I received a wonderful and totally unexpected Christmas present the other day when I got this note from a writer in Los Angeles named Chris Farnsworth. “Mr. Malanowski,” he begins. “I don’t usually write the authors of books to tell them how much I enjoyed their works — I’m a writer also, and I’m usually …
Dana Milbank, a correspondent for The Washington Post, has just published Homo Politicus, a smart and very funny tour d’horizon of Washington and the people there who run our government. In the book, Milbank adopts the guise of an anthropologist to examine their culture and behavior, a very clever and revealing way to think afresh …