It was my great pleasure to participate in the 1st Annual Writers’ Conference of the Writing Center, now of Hunter College, late of Marymount Manhattan. I was on a panel that made pronouncements about the Blogosphere, of all things. Joining me in this mission was the estimable Patty Marx, Jesse Kornbluth, Susan J. Behrens, and …
And the War Came, my new book, is a reality, or at least an e-reality, since at this point, it can be obtained only in digital form. Nonetheless, it is here, and real, and starting to get attention. I’m almost as pleased with the above video as I am with the book. Many, many, many …
In a fine example of state of the art thinking circa 1980, Peter Beinart today explains in The Daily Beast why this is Sarah Palin should seize this moment to run for president. “There will be never be a better moment,” he writes. “A conventional politician might bide his or her time, amass a record …
THE AXIS OF VANITY (OR, WHEN REALITY TV STARS COLLIDE) Read More »
I ventured into the wilds of lower Hastings (or perhaps it was uper Yonkers) to attend the latest version of Spoken Interludes, the series of readings organized and hosted by my friend, the novelist DeLaune Michel. Last night’s readers were Jennifer Coady Epstein, author of the novel The Painter from Shanghai (almost all the guests …
Forty years ago, at the tender age of 17, I found in the book rack at Reade’s drug store on Belair Road in Baltimore–improbably enough–a copy of Managing Mailer, an account of Norman Mailer 1969 campaign to become mayor of New York, written by his manager Joe Flaherty. As I have previously written, this book …
The political analyst Jeff Greenfield, who very generously gave a cover blurb to The Coup a few years ago, has written an insightful new book called Then Everything Changed, a very entertaining account of a bizarro political journey through three recent decades–sixties, seventies and eighties–in which a very plausible turn of one event sends the …
In an elegantly-written article in the Times today, Cathy Horyn talks to Christine Baranski, a girl from Buffalo, apparently Polish, who turned herself into an artist–a person of intellect, refinement, passion. She comes across as kind of wonderful, most especially in this passage: “All this talk about former haunts led Ms. Baranski to observe: “We’re …
Just finished Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, by the cultural critic David Yaffe. Very stimulating! Yaffe is a close, attentive, erudite listener and student, and a wise interpreter of the great Dylan. The book makes me wish I had paid closer attention to Dylan as an artist over the years, instead of just “liking” …
. . .although talking about fighting might be best of all. I had a great time last night moderating a TimesTalk discussion at, natch, The New York Times, on the subject of Disunion and the Civil War. I had an excellent panel to work with–Adam Goodheart, a Disunion series mainstay and author of a new …
On the one hand, the Daily Mail reports that the Education Secretary of the UK says that classic literature is dying out in schools. Michael Gove says that “barely one in 100 studied books published before 1900.” The article says that only 1,236 of the 300,000 pupils who took the most popular English literature exam …