Occasioned by the premiere of The Playboy Club on NBC and Pan Am on ABC, the folks at the Canadian Broadcasting Company thought they wanted to talk about the sudden burst of nostalgia for the sixties, and invited me to appear on their prime time talk show Connect with Mark Kelly, to, ah, connect my …
Preach it, Sister Elizabeth Warren, preach it!
A couple of years ago, half paying attention to the ESPN Sunday Night Game of the Week, I noticed that the announcer John Miller kept referring to Mariano Rivera, the peerless closer of the New York Yankees, as “the great Rivera.” I don’t think he meant the words to be capitalized, as though we were …
Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee Chairman, doesn’t like the Buffet Rule because “It will attack job creators.” John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, says that the administration should stop threatening to raise taxes, and thus “end the uncertainty plaguing job creators.” Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, while opposing tax hikes, says that “The …
Last week, Pat Robertson, the sanctimonious, judgmental TV witch doctor, made news in which he condoned the right of a husband or wife to leave a spouse who is afflicted Alzheimer’s disease. His comments instigated an angry backlash, especially among other evangelical Christians. As Rene Lynch reported in the Los Angeles Times: “The controversy stems …
At the CNN/Tea Party Express Republican debate the other night, Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a hypothetical question about health insurance: What should happen if a healthy 30-year-old man who can afford insurance chooses not to buy it—and then becomes catastrophically ill and needs intensive care for six months? In the face of one of …
For eight or nine months after 9/11, I felt pretty depressed about the mass murder of people who were exactly like me and who on another day could easily have been me, and about the brutal attack on the city where I had made my home. Sometime in the spring, however, I read an article …
I don’t feel much like looking back on 9/11 this morning because I don’t feel that I’ve actually looked away. There entered our lives that day an element of fear that wasn’t there before. Over time that feeling has sometimes sharpened, like during the financial crisis, and sometimes dulled, but it has never gone away, …
Ryan Adams shot the video for this gem of a song on September 7, 2001. The World Trade Center looms in all its dopey, stolid earnestness throughout the film, oblivious to its imminent destruction. It always chokes me to see this.