In The Guardian, Rick Gekoski elegantly makes the point that literary culture is disappearing. “Supposing that we were back in the year 1974, and playing a game of Humiliation (later made popular in David Lodge‘s Changing Places) in which you earn points by naming books that you haven’t read and which you think the other …
Our old dog Vicki has been spending a lot of time on the lawn by herself. She did this a bit over the summer, but not this much, and never in her younger years. It’s an awfully nice day here, and we have a canine house guest that Vicki can’t stand. But we’re concerned that …
My cousin Stephanie Bauman sent this to me. It’s a kind of a test (an ungraded one) that evaluates if you’re really from Baltimore (or, to be more precise, if you’re really from Baltimore and from a certain era–mostly the 1950s and 1960s.) You could only buy a Volvo from Michaelson Motors on Reisterstown Rd, …
At the start of the financial crisis in 2007, my friend Chris Napolitano noted that the from the public’s point of view, the Indispensable Man had taken himself out of the battle. He was talking about Eliot Spitzer, whose work as Attorney General in exposing misdeeds on Wall Street certainly had certainly positioned him as …
In the day’s most astonishing story, Kevin Sieff of The Washington Post reports that “A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War — a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery’s role as a cause …
“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now,” President Obama recently told a group of Democratic donors in Massachusetts, “and facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country …
Paul Newman, Natasha Richardson and Lauren Bacall, enroute to a party for Talk magazine, August 1999. Photograph by Daffyd Jones. Found on Jeff Wells‘s site Hollywood Elsewhere.
My friend Josh Green of The Atlantic created quite a splash this past week by revealing that Rich Iott(pictured, second from right), the Republican nominee for Congress from Ohio’s 9th District, and a Tea Party favorite, who for years donned a German Waffen SS uniform and participated in Nazi re-enactments. As Josh reports, Iott was …