George Blanda began playing pro football before I was born and concluded his career when I was 23, far too young and immature to understand him as anything but an anachronistic and vaguely humorous figure. Now I am trying to continue a career at an age far beyond that which Blanda had attained when he …
Friends of this blog know of my interest in the widespread use of CCTV in the UK. This past week, CCTV was very much in the news when a running camera captured a woman in Coventry named Mary Bale strolling down an ordinary suburban street and picking up an ordinary tabby cat, which she proceeded …
Thanks to my friend Rebecca Lavoie, one of my discoveries at Playboy (and yes, it’s LaVOY, not LaVWA), I was a guest today on Word of Mouth, a program on New Hampshire Public Radio, where Rebecca is a producer. I spoke to host Virginia Prescott (left) about my piece on lying in Details. Look out, …
My friend Michael Gross (left) had to know this would happen. In the September issue of Vanity Fair, a writer named Michael Joseph Gross (right) published a profile a profile of Sarah Palin which one can fairly describe as unflattering (“Anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness …
Until I get a chance to read Tony Blair‘s memoir A Journey, reviews will have to suffice. Writing in The New Yorker, John Lanchester is not such a fan, although he offers a quote from Blair that is worth its weight in gold. “That Blair was a formidable politician,” writes Lanchester, “can be seen in …
As Lori Montgomery reports in the Washington Post, “Senate Republicans are rolling out a plan to permanently extend an array of expiring tax breaks that would deprive the Treasury of more than $4 trillion over the next decade, nearly doubling projected deficits over that period unless dramatic spending cuts are made. The measure, introduced by …
I just received a note on Facebook from my cousin, Walter King. He and I played together when we were six or seven or so, but then his family moved to Oklahoma. I have seen him but once in the intervening time, at a family reunion at the home of our cousin Charlotte, maybe 25 …
Christine O’Donnell‘s Tea Party-fueled victory over the seemingly safe establishment figure Mike Castle in Delaware is prompting no shortage of chin-stroking among the punditry, all wondering what this development, coming on the heels of all the other victories Tea Party candidates have had over Republican mainstays in GOP intra-party rumbles, is apt to mean for …
In a comment on the declining state of magazine journalism, conservative firebug Dinesh D’Souza has published an article in Forbes that is one of the goofiest, sloppiest, most nonsensical pieces of punditry I have had the misfortune to read. D’Souza, once a rising star among right-wing polemicists, proves himself one of its dimmer bulbs in …
For years, the Republican establishment has encouraged its right-wing fringe, confident that good tough anti-communist talk from Nixon would keep the Birchers in line while his Commerce Secretary sold Pepsi to the Soviets, or that family values invocations from Reagan would keep the evangelicals coming back, even if he never did a thing to outlaw …