As someone who spent a good part of the eighties arguing how such manifestly incomplete candidates like Carter, Mondale and Dukakis could–yes, truly, absolutely could–fill the inside straights that would take them to the White House, I sympathize with the excruciating efforts of those Republican loyalists who are trying to convince people, most importantly themselves, …
I was terribly sad to learn that my friend John Stacks died last week, finally succumbing to the cancer that he had been fighting for the last four years. I got to know John Stacks when I was running the Notebook section at Time in 1997 and 1998, and he was the Executive Editor to …
Found on Facebook, a photo of a couple, Alexis Creque and Russell Murphy, after their arrest last month for allegedly spray-painting a Lower East Side building. An 1980s-era infraction, but the sentiment is au courant.
Was this best political convention of my lifetime? Almost certainly; not only was the roster of spectacular speakers unbelievably rich, bu whoever assembled the order respected the themes of the speech with a subtle and almost literary elegance. Invoking Ted Kennedy near the beginning of the proceedings Tuesday was a brilliant stroke. Summoning the ancients …
. . .so far, anyway, has appeared in The American Conservative. It is called “Revolt of the Rich,”and it is by by Mike Lofgren, who spent 16 years as a Republican staffer on House and Senate Budget Committees. In the article, he makes a case that very few other Republicans are willing to advocate: not …
For as much as I like President Obama, I’m afraid the Bill Clinton is the still the Big Dog of the Democratic Party. When he takes the stage at the convention in Charlotte on Thursday, I hope he comes in like Buford Pusser in Walking Tall, carrying a 2×4 and ready to set the record …
WHAT I WANT TO HEAR FROM PRESIDENT CLINTON ON WEDNESDAY. . . Read More »
>The Economist is a pretty conservative magazine, but their cover this week hits the mark. “One question, Mr. President,” it reads, “just what would you do with another four years?” with the passage of the stimulus (shoulda gone farther), health care reform (shoulda gone farther), Dodd-Frank (shoulda gone really farther), getting out of Iraq (we …
. . .AND WHAT I WANT TO HEAR FROM PRESIDENT OBAMA ON THURSDAY Read More »
Apart from that special day when the temperature was topping 90, a skunky stink was broaching the perimeter of the property, and poison ivy was breaking out all over my body–quite the trifecta!–nothing quite so pleased me this summer as those occasions when I happened upon Carly Rae Jepson singing “Call Me Maybe.” I know …
(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 …