Three of the most interesting hours of my life were spent in the company of Henry Bromell, who died the other day at the age of 65. Henry was a writer–of short stories and television scripts mostly, but also of an also of a novel and of screenplays. Ann Kolson had assigned me to write a piece on him for The New York Times; the occasion was his debut as a film director for a film called Panic, about a hitman, for which he had also written the screenplay. We met him at the Algonquin Hotel–the only interview I’ve ever conducted there–and I liked him immediately. Easy-going, friendly, funny, interested, smart–he was anything other than self-absorbed. We talked for literally three hours, which was about three times the amount of time usually required to complete the assignment. Although I was careful to cover the usual bases that needed for my assignment, the encounter wasn’t like an interview at all, but more just a delightful conversation. We talked about film, books, writing, his interesting upbringing, about Homicide: Life on the Streets (where had had performed distinguished work and which was one of my favorite series.) It was just an enormously enjoyable experience, with no sense of the professional wall that typically exists between subject and interviewer. I was thrilled to see that he had achieved recent success with Homeland; that was arena he knew well from his upbringing in the Middle East as the son of a CIA operative. I’m glad that he capped his career with success.

Here are a couple of Henry’s quotes from the piece:

”My editor says I’m the only person she knows who’s written for television that television has made a better writer,” said Mr. Bromell, pointing out that writing for David Chase, who was the executive producer of ”I’ll Fly Away” and is the executive producer of ”The Sopranos,” was the most rigorous experience of his career. ”He thinks in terms of a page and a half or two pages, and within that time, there should be two turns, two times where the scene goes someplace that you didn’t see coming, that’s real and is believable. And he’s a Chekovian, so for him the whole scene has to have a subtext. Even if it’s not mentioned, you’ve got to feel it and understand it. Really tough stuff. But you get excited by what he says, because you see that he’s made it better.”

Reaction to ”Panic” has been positive; Mr. Bromell seems particularly pleased by friends who’ve told him that he has made a European movie. ”Most of the filmmakers I love are Europeans,” he says, enumerating a catalog of favorites that quickly begins to include directors from Japan, India and America but that leaves out most of today’s Hollywood filmmakers.

”Working on the series, we would get as production assistant these very bright kids from U.S.C. film school and N.Y.U. film school who begin each day asking what would be entertaining for the greatest number of people. Not, ‘What if I take that character and put him in a room with that character?’ Now they think like agents and producers. They’re very comfortable servicing corporate culture. They don’t see as their fundamental role being critical or making people laugh in a way they’re not used to laughing.
They think, ‘All right, we got to bring in 30 million people, how are we going to do this?’ I think, ‘If all we’re going to do is serve corporate culture, where are our ideas going to come from?’ ”

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 the song is a featherweight thing, but the tune is catchy, and, more important, the singer’s innocence flirtiness simply melts my heart. And it’s fun–just simple, silly, stupid, joyous fun. Of all the video versions–and it’s particularly hard to resist the US Olympic swim team’s version, featuring the charming Missy Franklin–I find the most pleasure in the video Jepson made with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots, all of them playing children’s instruments. I love the starstruck disbelief that is all over Jepson’s face, I love Fallon’s older brotherly earnestness, and most of all, I love the Roots’ implacable professional cool. It’s a smile, every time.

On Morning Joe today, Chris Matthews, a bulldozer on most days, completely demolishes GOP Party chairman Reince Priebus. “That cheap shot about ‘I don’t have a problem with my birth certificate’ was awful,” Matthews said of GOP hopeful Mitt Romney’s Friday embrace of the birther notion that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. “It is an embarrassment to your party to play that card. This stuff about getting rid of the work requirement for welfare is dishonest, everyone has pointed out that it’s dishonest,” he continued. “And you are playing that little ethnic card there. You can play your games and giggle about it, but the fact is, your side is playing that card. You start talking about work requirements, you know what game you’re playing, everybody knows what game you’re playing. It’s a race card. And this thing about birthers — yeah, if your name’s Romney, you were well born, you went to prep school, you can brag about it. And this [Barack Obama] guy, he’s got an African name, he’s got to live with it. … This is absurdity! Making fun of this guy’s birth certificate issue when it was never a real issue, except on the right wing.”

“You got your monologue in, so congratulations,” Priebus quipped to Matthews. “You’re loaded up, you got it out. So, good for you. The fact of the matter is, is he’s from Michigan, he was born in Michigan, he was making the point that I was born in Michigan. And you know what? We’ve gotten to a place in politics that any moment of levity totally frowned upon by guys like you just so that you can push your brand.”

“It just seems funny that the first joke that he’s ever told in his life is about Obama’s birth certificate,” Matthews pointed out.

“I think Obama’s policies have created a sense that, for whatever reason, he’s looking for guidance, as far as health care is concerned, as far as our spending is concerned, as far as these stimulus packages are concerned — he’s looking to Europe for guidance,” Priebus explained.

“What?” Matthews exclaimed. “Where do you get this from? This is insane! … What’s this got to do with Europe and the foreignization of the guy. You’re doing it again now! You think he’s influenced by foreign influences? You’re playing that card again.”

“I’m not going to get into a shouting match with Chris,” the RNC chairman said, dismissing the MSNBC host with a wave of his hand.

“Because you’re losing, that’s why,” Matthews shot back.

“No, I’m not losing,” Priebus insisted. “I’m not going to sit here and take shots.”

“Cheap shots about how Obama being a foreigner is the thing your party’s been pushing,” Matthews noted. “[Romney surrogate John] Sununu pushes it. Everybody pushes it in your party.”

“It’s garbage,” Priebus replied. “Garbage.”

“It’s your garbage,” Matthews concluded.

This post was originally published on nymag.com. Click here to read it.

The economist Niall Ferguson had a piece in Newsweek the other day entitled “The Cure for Our Economy’s Stationary State.” As in his most recent book, the Harvard historian pointed out that the economies of the United States and Europe have lost their dynamism, while China is leaping ahead. The solution? More technological innovation, says Ferguson, along with “more free trade, more encouragement for small business, less bureaucracy, and less crony capitalism.” Especially less bureaucracy. “Question: if you want to open a lemonade stand in New York City, how long does it take to jump through the necessary bureaucratic hoops? The answer is 65 days (including a wait of up to five weeks for your Food Protection Certificate). That’s the kind of crazy red tape that development economists like Hernando de Soto used to blame for Third World poverty.”

Alas, I don’t know anything about Hernando de Soto, but I do recognize a lame journalistic convention when I smell one, and sure enough, the “65 days” Ferguson cites with triumphant specificity comes not from any academic institution or think tank or good government group, but from John Stossel, the moustachioed libertarian gadfly of Fox News.

Last February, Stossel got worked up because some excessively officious cops in Midway, Georgia, closed down a lemonade stand operated by two sisters, 10 and 14. Appalled by this lack of common sense, Stossel decided to see what it would take to open a lemonade stand in New York City, and he had a high old time making the city seem stupid for requiring him to have a fire extinguisher and to take a food-preparation course and get his tax payment arrangements properly set up. In the end, Stossel did not actually complete the exercise; had all the inspections been conducted as scheduled, he says that the exercise would have taken — ta daaa — 65 days.

Of course, it’s absurd to suggest that lemonade stands would need regulation, and the vast majority come and go without the heavy hand of Big Government crimping anyone’s entrepreneurial style. (Stossel himself set up a stand on Sixth Avenue in front of News Corp. headquarters before his approval process was completed, and the police ignored him.) What made the exercise seem so ridiculous, of course, is that the tendentious Stossel was obviously completing the program that a full-fledged restaurant would have to go through: food-preparation courses for chefs, regular Health Department inspections, and a fire extinguisher on the wall. And 65 days doesn’t seem like an excessive amount of time to complete the process.

Ferguson, meanwhile, cites the 65 days like it was written at the bottom of the tablet Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. A reporter’s gimmicky stunt now has the imprimatur of a Harvard historian. And Fox News still loves the lemonade gimmick, interviewing two little girls about their lemonade stand as part of the Barack Obama “you didn’t build that” faux-troversy.

In the meantime, let’s declare a moratorium on lemonade-stand regulation. The drag on the economy just isn’t worth it.

While we’re waiting for that to happen, let’s keep an eye open for that magic “65 days” figure to show up again. Bedbugs are easier to kill that a juicy factoid.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A jury acquitted John Edwards of one count of campaign finance crimes last week, and hung on five other counts, allowing the smarmy ex-senator to go free. Afterwards, Edwards offered a self-serving but fairly innocuous comment to the media (it appears at around the 2:15 mark above, and lasts around a minute.) Innocuous to me, anyway; on Hardball with Chris Matthews a couple hours later, it set HuffPo‘s Howard Fineman and Cap’n Huffinpuff himself into arias of denunciation.

HOWARD FINEMAN: He has so veered off into the land of creepy self-delusion. I–I’m watching–I’m watching a, a, a, a, a car crash of, of, of craziness here. And I know there are second lives in American politics. But the notion that he took this occasion to weave the story of his children, of all his children, including the one that he had with the mistress that he was having relations with while his wife was dying of cancer, that he’s going to weave the story of those children into the story of the poor people of America and the world, and thus I am going to be the Pied Piper leading the Americas and the children of the world together into a new public role for myself, that was so beyond any level of self awareness as to be almost pathological.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: (sounds like) Yahhmmmmmm.
HOWARD FINEMAN: Did I make myself clear?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yah, I did, I did, I think you captured it.
HOWARD FINEMAN: It’s just, sometimes the shamelessness–shamelessness of public figures, especially of politicians, is astounding to me. You have to have to a certain level of shamelessness to be in political life, let alone to run for office–
CHRIS MATTHEWS: You put it so well.
HOWARD FINEMAN: –let alone to run for office–but to but to do that, on the occasion was just mind-boggling, completely mind-boggling. I’m sorry, it’s mind-boggling.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: You’ve never been better, you’ve never been better at explaining the reality of political thinking, which is, it’s all id. It’s all ego.

Matthews and Fineman went on and on, working themselves into a froth about the specter of an Edwards comeback. Thank goodness in the next segment Melinda Henneberger came on and coolly suggested that Edwards was just chucking platitudes, mercifully throwing a bucket of cold water on the poor heated puppies before they dry-humped themselves into exhaustion.

The fifth season of Mad Men got off to a fast start, and although a lot was happening, the episode will likely go down as the `Zoo Be Zoo Be Zoo’ episode, after the song that Jessica, Don’s young wife, performed for him at the birthday party she threw for him.

As Lauren Streib reports in The Daily Beast, the song is actually called `Zou Bisou Bisou’. “The original version was recorded by Gillian Hills, a Brigitte Bardot lookalike who found fame as a French yé-yé girl—one of a handful of young, female European singers who catapulted yé-yé music into an international movement, popular among teens during the era. (“Yé-yé” refers to exclamations of “yeah yeah!” during rock and roll.) Roughly translated, “zou” is a casual exclamation and “bisou” is a sweet kiss—a peck on the cheek to say hello and goodbye. So the lyrics hash out to: Oh! Kiss kiss / My God, they are sweet! / …Oh! Kiss kiss / the sound of kisses /…Oh! Kiss kiss /…That means, I confess / But yes, I love only you!”

The song was performed by Sophia Loren in the 1960 film The Millionairess, co-starring Peter Sellers. “Loren sang an English version, Zoo Be Zoo Be Zoo. Loren’s version uses the same tune, but the lyrics and delivery swell with a bit more sophistication. The movie was a hit in the U.K., though the American response was lukewarm.”

I was sorry to see that on Wednesday The New York Times Op-Ed page turned over a third of its precious acreage to Bill Maher so that he could offer some self-serving drivel about how America needs to be more accepting of dumb, vaguely insulting jokes.

At least that what he seemed to be saying. He led off referring to a lame joke that Robert DeNiro made at an Obama fundraiser about whether America is ready for a white First Lady, which caused professional mischief-maker Newt Gingrich to pause in his brilliant parody of a political campaign to demand that President Obama offer an apology. DeNiro tugged his forelock and everything was set to be forgotten when Maher chose to spotlight the event as Exhibit A in his campaign against Excessive Touchiness.

“When did we get it in our heads that we have the right to never hear anything we don’t like? In the last year, we’ve been shocked and appalled by the unbelievable insensitivity of Nike shoes, the Fighting Sioux, Hank Williams Jr., Cee Lo Green, Ashton Kutcher, Tracy Morgan, Don Imus, Kirk Cameron, Gilbert Gottfried, the Super Bowl halftime show and the ESPN guys who used the wrong cliché for Jeremy Lin after everyone else used all the others. Who can keep up? ‘’

Surely I can’t; I wouldn’t pass the final if these questions were on Intro to Contretemps 101. But this appeal to reason was hardly Maher’s true agenda. Maher was camouflauing himself amid these minor offenders because just a couple of weeks ago, after Rush Limbaugh was roundly and soundly rebuked for his nasty and misogynistic vilification of the Georgetown Law school student Sandra Fluke, Maher found himself dragged up on similar charges. In the Daily Beast, Kirsten Powers cataloged the painfully large number of insults that supposedly liberal commentators used against women who happened to hold views different than their own. Among those she cited: Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut” on MSNBC ; Keith Olbermann saying on MSNBC that Michelle Malkin was “a mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick’’; Chris Matthews, again on MSNBC, calling Hilary Clinton at various times a “she-devil,” “Nurse Ratched,” “Madame Defarge”, “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “uppity”; and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who wrote in his blog, “When I read [Malkin’s] stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of balls in her mouth.”

“But the grand pooh-bah of media misogyny,’’ wrote Powers, “is without a doubt Bill Maher—who also happens to be a favorite of liberals—who has given $1 million to President Obama’s super PAC. Maher has called Sarh Palin a “dumb twat” and “a cunt.’’ He called Palin and Michelle Bachmann “MILFs’’–“Morons I’d Like to Forget.’’

As is now all too obvious, Maher didn’t write the article because he was concerned about people being too insensitive; it’s because being a pig and a boor is a big part of his act, and he’s probably worried that if too many people start to call him on it, he’ll lose his HBO gig and find himself back in front of a brick wall at Mr. Laffs saying “Hey, tell me—what’s with chicks and shoes?’’

“I don’t want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone,’’ writes Maher. “If we sand down our rough edges and drain all the color, emotion and spontaneity out of our discourse, we’ll end up with political candidates who never say anything. . . ‘’

Is that what Maher is doing when he calls Palin a cunt? Being a little rough-edged? Supplying a little color? Emotion? I know it’s not spontaneity. Every one of those witless insults is measured for effect, calculated to get the meatheads in the audience to go “Woooooo!’’

These remarks are not clever, or witty, or even very entertaining, and certainly not brave. They’re just markers, a way Maher tells the audience that he and they are alike because none of them likes Palin, except that he’s a bigger truth-teller, because he’s willing to be bolder, more irreverent, and more obscene.

In fact, all he’s doing is being a pig. He may as well oink at his audience, and let them squeal at him in return. He may as well run as advertisement that says “I can’t help it if I’m not as smart as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.”

Maker may contend that he treats men just as harshly as women, but he’s smart enough to recognize the weakness of that argument. Men are not laboring under the effects of centuries of discrimination and worse. He wouldn’t use words like nigger and kike, and for the same reasons, he shouldn’t use cunt or slut or twat. These words cut more deeply than we can see. A 2010 study showed that calling a female candidate such sexist names as “ice queen” and “mean girl” significantly undercut her political standing, and did much more harm than gender-neutral criticism based solely on her policy positions and actions. “Harder-edged attacks, such as referring to her as a prostitute, were equally damaging among voters,’’ reported USA Today. “The female candidate lost twice as much support when even the mild sexist language was added to the attack. Support for her initially measured at 43% fell to 33% after the policy-based attacks but to 21% after the sexist taunts.’’ The study showed that the drop was significant among both men and women, those under 50 and over 50, and those with college educations and without. “The sexist language undermined favorable perceptions of the female candidate, leading voters to view her as less empathetic, trustworthy and effective.’’

Maher says he doesn’t want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone. I don’t think he’s in any real danger of that. What I don’t want is to live in a country where my wife or my daughters or my friends could stand up and speak their minds, and be slagged as a slut or a cunt by nitwits like Limbaugh or Maher. This isn’t Afghanistan or Iran. Women shouldn’t be ridiculed and degraded for speaking their minds.

Maher’s on HBO, so his piggery can’t cost him advertisers. But what it ought to cost him is the approval of free-thinking people. So here’s my question. It’s for Charles Blow Arianna Huffington Alexandra Pelosi, Andrew Sullivan, Russ Feingold, James Carville, Ross Douthat, Neil deGrasse Tyson, John Heilemann ,Eliot Spitzer, Al Sharpton Bill Moyers, Jennifer Granholm, Chris Matthews and all the other leaders who have been on guests on Maher’s program. Is whatever you’re selling so important that you will perfume Maher’s stench with your presence on his stage?

In The Atlantic, Jared Keller has assembled a rather brainy slide show–a collection of literary references in The Simpsons. Many of my favorites are here, including Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chambon, George Plimpton, Gore Vidal, Robert Caro, The New Yorker, Tom Wolfe, The Economist, and William L. Shirer.Somehow Keller missed the episde in which Lisa mentioned the end of Spy.