Here’s a new piece done for my new friends at The American Interest: The incidences of writers taking ownership of words are few and far between. Moses or whoever wrote Genesis certainly owns begat; the authors of the Declaration own inalienable; and Maurice Sendak owns rumpus. I cannot hear the word without thinking of reading …
With the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in arriving this June, we should prepare ourselves for a deluge of Watergate- and Nixon-related material. This may well be the last good anniversary opportunity to revive and relive this massively frightening, entertaining scandal before the vast majority of those who cared about these matters as they were …
In the Times yesterday, Joe Nocera wrote a column that groused, if I read it correctly, about a man attaining excellence in his life’s work, and gently chided the man, it seems to me, for being great. Nocera, whom I generally admire for his lucid writing about the turgid field of business and economics, took …
video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player Newt Gingrich, a man far and away my favorite presidential candidate, and the most sublimely creative, spontaneous, narcissistic, brilliant, shameless, cynical, destructive, ridiculous, entertaining political figure of my lifetime, has suspended his presidential campaign. That’s right, suspended. Forget that he commands negligible support. Forget that Romney has all but won. …
Ed Gillespie, John McCain, Sean Hannity and other Republicans can complain all they want about President Obama taking the credit for making the decision to take down Osama bin Laden. After all, it’s what happened; as Walter Brennan used to say, “No brag, just fact.” Maybe it was a little tacky to bring Mitt Romney‘s …
Led by a great band of musicians headed by guitarists Larry Campbell and Jimmy Iovine, the funeral procession that took Levon Helm to his final rest paraded through Woodstock, where Helm had long made his home.
Liverpool’s famous racist Luis Suarez launches a nearly fifty foot chip shot and scores against Norwich on Saturday’s English Premier League action.
The other day in a post about some of the recent activities of Google’s Sergey Brin, we postulated a new Iron Law of the modern era: When rich guys talk about freedom, hold on to your wallet. They are almost always talking about ways to make themselves more free to get more money. Or at …
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In Psychology Today, Jonathan Gottschall offers an article that will come as a consolation to all writers: even the great one struggle. In proof, he offers some telling pages from some highly celebrated novels. In order: First, Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust; Couples, by John Updike; Crash, by J.G. Ballard; Great Expectations, by …
Here is an Iron Law of the modern era: When rich guys talk about freedom, hold on to your wallet. They are almost always talking about ways to make themselves more free to get more money. Case in point: in an interview with The Guardian on Sunday, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, said that …