AT THE CONFLUENCE OF VANITY AND MEGALOMANIA . . .
. . .is Trump Tower, right next door to Tiffany’s, where Customer of the Year Newt Gingrich met with TV Star-self-promoter Donald Trump to discuss how they might mutualy enrich one another.
A RARITY: THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF THE REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION
In honor of Newt Gingrich’s ascension to front-running status in the Republican presidential contest, I am going into the vaults and resurrecting a nugget from the archives, a solid gold Jamie Malanowski rarity. Here, from early 1996, is the never-before-been-published The Short Happy Life of the Republican Revolution: A Libretto of a Musical in Search …
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LUCKING ONTO `LUCKING OUT’
I have long admired the critic James Wolcott–his slashing wit, his erudition, his vocabulary, his taste and perception–but although we know many people in common, we have never met. Until I read his new book Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York, his lively memoir of a youth spent in …
SPRINGTIME FOR GINGRICH
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863,” wrote William Faulkner in Intruder in the Dust, speaking of the moment just before Pickett’s charge, when “this time, maybe this time” the Confederate …
“PRIVACY IS FOR PAEDOS”
Testifying before Parliament today, Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World tabloid, admitted that he and his colleagues hacked into people’s phones, paid police officers for tips, conducted surveillance operations in unmarked vans outside people’s homes, stole confidential documents, rifled through celebrity garbage cans and posed as …
HIGH ON THE HIGH LINE
Yesterday I finally took myself out of the running to become the last person in the greater metropolitan area to visit the High Line, the terrific elevated urban park built on the elevated rail bed that runs through Chelsea on Manhattan’s far west side. I will now add my puny voice to the great chorus …
BRING ON THE REPUBLICAN OVERREACH!
Writing in The Atlantic last week, James Kwak had the best analysis of the failure of the ludicrously-named Supercommittee: the committee may have failed, but the Republicans won. Indeed, as Kwak says, they had already won. “In 1994, Newt Gingrich — the man who is now the frontrunner in the Anyone-But-Mitt race — led the …
TOM WICKER, RIP
The great reporter and columnist Tom Wicker of The New York Times, died on Friday at the age of 85. In a long and distinguished career, he stood out for his clear thinking, probity, and ethical courage. The defining moment of his career was his performance covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which was …
THE BROKEN CONTRACT
With the premiere of Iron Lady approaching at the end of December, we are certain to be treated to a heavy dose of Margaret Thatcher‘s greatest hits. None will be more pertinent to the issues of this moment that the point she made in her final Question session as prime minister in 1990, shown in …