The highlight of early 2010, namely the class I taught at Marymount Manhattan College, came to an end Thursday night. Called “Writing in a New environment,” we explored blogging, tweeting, and the many changes digital technology has foisted on the word industry. I was joined by a group of students that was small but curious …
First, the roster of the silver medal-winning US Men’s Olympic Hockey Team includes MVP goalie Ryan Miller, defensemen Ryan Suter and Ryan Whitney, and forwards Ryan Kessler, Ryan Malone, Ryan Callahan, Ryan Kesler and Bobby Ryan; I don’t know if Coach Peter Laviolette was ever whistled for too many Ryans on the ice, but he …
The Writing Center of Marymount Manhattan College celebrated its 17th anniversary with a dinner at Doubles in the Sherry Netherland on Wednesday night, and thanks to El Directore, Lewis Burke Frumkes, I got to attend. Among the others present were Bruce Jay Friedman (who told me a funny story about how he hired Mario Puzo …
Oscars are amusing, Olympics are fun, but for a good solid laugh, give me the competition for the Diagram Prize, the award presented annually to the Oddest Book Title of the Year. The shortlist of nominees for this year’s prize, which has been awarded for the past 32 years by the British trade publication The …
In 2008 a young poet named T.A. Noonan conducted interviews with Stacy Morrison, who is the editor-in-chief of Redbook, and with me, in my capacity as Managing Editor of Playboy, on the topic of fiction in magazines. Ms. Noonan has run the results on her website, which is called Delirious Hem. The results, I think, …
There was a fascinating story in The Telegraph last week about a new book and a new film in France that alleges that the legenday novelist Alexander Dumas, left, author of The Three Muskateers and The Count of Monte Christo and other fabulous, fantastic stories of the 18th and 19th century, benefited enormously from having …
The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, by Duquesne law professor Ken Gormley, appears more than a decade after the sex-and-real estate scandal called Whitewater ebbed out, but even though Gormley does a fine job in retelling the tale, by the time the reader wades through the nearly 700 pages of bad judgments and …
I’m a little surprised by the wave of acclaim that has buoyed Game Change onto the top of the bestsellers’ list. The book was written by Mark Halperin, whose excellent work a few years ago on ABC News’s The Note revolutionized political coverage, and by John Heileman. Halperin now writes for Time; Heilemann, for New …
J.D. Salinger, whom Stephen King today rightfully called “the last of the great post-World War II novelists,” died Thursday in New Hampshire at 91. Most people played up the legacy of The Catcher in the Rye, its great teenage narrator, its definitive postwar voice, its eternal first sentence (“If you really want to hear about …
Many years ago, Walter Kirn worked in the cubicle next to me at Spy, and he was a most entertaining neighbor (in fact, Walter was succeeded by Jim Collins and then by Larry Doyle. On the other side, I had Joanne Gruber. Spy provided me with tremendous neighbors.) During Walter’s short tenure, we spent pretty …