In conjunction with the AHA annual meeting in Boston, the History News Network of George Mason University announced the sixth annual Cliopatria Awards for History Blogging on Friday. The award for Best Series of Posts went to Jamie Malanowski, David Blight, William Freehling, Adam Goodheart, and others, for Disunion, on the New York Times Opinionator …
The Washington Monthly has just published my review of Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters, the new book by Ben Tarnoff about three American counterfeiters who plied their trade between 1750 and 1865. In reading this entertaining, educational history, I was struck by how useful the idea of counterfeiting is …
In his recent review in The New Yorker of a number of books about the entity known as late-night television, Louis Menand recounts the famous evening when Dick Cavett hosted Gore Vidal, Janet Flanner and a drunken, obsteperous Norman Mailer. I don’t recall if I saw the original program in 1971 (my senior year of …
My friend Howard Samuels was the recipient of the 2010 Hollywood Arts Inspiration Award last Saturday night in Los Angeles. Congratulations, Howard! Well done!
In his new memoir Decision Points, former President George W. Bush says that he personally approved the use of waterboarding against 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission human rights experts say could have legal consequences for him. Bush says that he was asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who …
Last night at Borders in Mount Kisco I had the pleasure of meeting Maneet Ahuja, one of the producers of Squawk Box, CNBC’s always informative, highly stimulating, and occasionally depressing morning program. The multi-talented Maneet is working on a book about hedge fund managers that promises to be one of the definitive studies of these …
In The Hellhound of Wall Street, Michael Perino has just published an excellent account of the Pecora Hearings, the shorthand name given to the hearings of the Senate Banking Committe in February 1933, during the waning moments of the Hoover administration. The hearings were named not for the committee chairman, the well-motivated but less-than-charismatic chairman …
In The Washington Post last Sunday, the social scientist Charles Murray wrote one of those uncommon articles that manages to intrigue and infuriate all at once. Murray’s thesis is that the America’s elite is out of touch with “the real America.” Writes Murray, “We know, for one thing, that the New Elite clusters in a …
In 1998, when I was editing the Notebook section of Time, I had to find someone to compose a 300 word eulogy for Tammy Wynette, the great country singer who had died that week. I decided to approach a fledgling short story writer named Roseanne Cash; of course, it didn’t hurt that Cash was a …
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 …