(First published in The Washington Monthly) Killing the Poormaster, the new book by Holly Metz, brings vividly to life 1930s Hoboken, New Jersey, making it easy to envision classic brownstones with street vendors, milk trucks, and boys in knickers in the same neighborhoods now filled with stockbrokers and hipsters. The book’s great achievement, however, is …
(first published in The American Prospect) The venerable publishing house Scribner recently published a new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel A Farewell to Arms, complete with all the many endings the author rejected. “I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied”, he told …
On Morning Joe today, Chris Matthews, a bulldozer on most days, completely demolishes GOP Party chairman Reince Priebus. “That cheap shot about ‘I don’t have a problem with my birth certificate’ was awful,” Matthews said of GOP hopeful Mitt Romney’s Friday embrace of the birther notion that President Barack Obama was not born in the …
Roger Stone, the notorious Republican operative and author of some most of the underhanded political tactics of the last four decades, is not a source normally to be trusted. However, when he says he smells a rat, only a fool doesn’t think it’s time to lock up the camenbert. Currently on his blog, Stone has …
Choice is a word frequently heard among top Republicans these days (but no, not in the abortion context.) Mitt Romney has been saying “We offer America a choice.” Paul Ryan has said “We owe the country a choice of two futures, so that the American people can decide what kind of America they want; what …
Fifty years ago, my Dad took me to the Baltimore Colts training camp in Westminster MD–and took these overexposed photos as proof! From left to right: the immortal Johnny Unitas, Gino Marchetti, Lenny Moore, Art Donovan and RC Owens. Four Hall of Famers–not bad!
President Obama turns 51 today, and is celebrating with a round of golf. When he hits the links today, he can do so with confidence that he is very likely to be holding the same job when he turns 55. In The Daily Beast today, Michael Tomasky writes something that I have long suspected (and …
Gore Vidal, the eminent man of letters, died last week at 86. In the splendid obituary that appeared in The New York Times, Charles McGrath wrote “ Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few …
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