(This article originally appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 6th.) The New York political campaign season is designed so that the optimistic hothouses of polling firms and campaign consultancies can cultivate exotic candidacies in March and April, and the unremitting glares of voters can cause them to wilt them on the hot, unforgiving sands of Orchard …
(This piece originally appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 7th.) It seems to me that the two potentially big outrage stories of the spring—the politicized IRS story and the data-mad NSA story—now have two things in common. First, they have both petered out as little or no evidence of nefarious activity has been discovered. Second, both …
(This first appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 7th.) When I last took weekend blog duty here, I coincidentally had an article in The New York Times in which I noted that the US Army had ten bases named after Confederate generals, and argued that we should rename them as soon as possible. My point, in …
(This first appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 6th.) We woke this morning to find that Edward Snowden (Mr. Around the World in Rrrrrrrrrrr! [sound of a screeching stop]) has been offered asylum first in Venezuela, and then in Nicaragua. Perhaps the only person entirely happy about this result may be John Logan, author of the …
At some point in high school, in one of those endless bifurcations people come up with to make sense of society, I realized that all the smart guys at my school could be divided up into two categories–word guys and numbers guys. Both word guys and numbers guys could get good grades in both the …
That’s what the parking lot guy said about the Lincoln XKZ, which, oddly, I was driving to the Farmhouse in Bedford. INnredibly, two other people had earlier signalled their approval of my wheels–that’s three in one day! These were the fruits of a promotion I got by being a reader of The New Yorker. The …
I haven’t been to the theater in a long time, but thanks to a secret benefactor, I was able to see two shows this week, both star vehicles. The first, I’ll Eat You Last, was an amusing trifle starring Bette Midler as the once legendary Hollywood agent Sue Mengers. As a decades-long fan of Midler …
As an early and excited fan of Mad Men (Okay, I realize that this doesn’t make me the first man on the moon, but I was there), it saddens me to say that I was pretty disappointed in this past season. I know others disagree–Troy Patterson in Slate called it the show’s best season ever–but …
Tony Horwitz has written an excellent article in The Atlantic called “150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War.” Horwitz, author of the very pereptive A Confederate in the Attic, makes the point that point that most Americans have a thin but generally positive view of the war, a post-WW II, post-civil rights era assessment that …
The question of whether James Gandolfini was the greatest actor of his era will be settled sometime in the future. Commentators will have to decide whether an 86 hour performance as one character (plus 25 or so stellar supporting performances) required more of an actor, and delivered more from an actor, than did, say, twenty …