The poet John Hollander has died at 83. He wrote one of my favorite poems, Hobbes, 1651: When I returned at last from Paris hoofbeats pounded Over the harsh and relenting road; It was cold, the snow high; I was old, and the winter Sharp, and the dead mid-century sped by In ominous, blurred streaks …
hanks to the folks at Jackson-McNally Bookstore in Soho for hosting a panel discussion by three of us who have been contributors to The New York Times‘ Disunion series, and to the new compilation of pieces from the series published by Black Dog & Levanthal. Clay Risen of the Times, Ted Widmer of Brown University, …
The Maritime Museum at Newport News is just splendid. The museum has a lot of terrific artifacts, including the pricelss eafle figurehead from the USS Lancaster, and a whole exhibit on Nelson and his battles at Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar. The highlight is the the terrific exhibit on the Monitor and the Virginia, including …
(This first appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 6th.) We woke this morning to find that Edward Snowden (Mr. Around the World in Rrrrrrrrrrr! [sound of a screeching stop]) has been offered asylum first in Venezuela, and then in Nicaragua. Perhaps the only person entirely happy about this result may be John Logan, author of the …
At some point in high school, in one of those endless bifurcations people come up with to make sense of society, I realized that all the smart guys at my school could be divided up into two categories–word guys and numbers guys. Both word guys and numbers guys could get good grades in both the …
Congratulations to my friend and client David Berg on the publication of his excellent new memoir Run, Brother, Run. The book is quite amazing–a funny, tender, perceptive, and angry family memoir about his dysfunctional upbringing, focusing especially on David’s beloved older brother Alan, a smart, talented, funny sharpie with a streak of nobility. When Alan …
With a lovely party at the handsome Greenwich Village apartment of Times editor rish Hall, editors George Kalogerakis and Clay Risen of the Opinionator section, a number of their colleagues, and a bunch of us who contributed to the paper’s Disunion series, celebrated the publication of Disunion, a collection of articles from the series, published …
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 …
Having spent all that (mostly enjoyable) time in graduate school reading The Prince, I was delighted to see that Professor Stephen J. Milner of the University of Manchester has discovered the arrest warrant for Niccolò Machiavelli hidden away in a state archive. The 500-years-old document was the catalyst for Machiavelli’s writing The Prince. When the …
Over the last twenty years or so, you could talk with people about great political books, like Game Change or what have you, and then somebody would remember that Richard Ben Cramer had written What It Takes, and that ended the conversation. None was better, and none would ever be better. Working on a big …