From Art Director Richard Weigand, a love letter to writers on the cover of Esquire‘s 40th anniversary issue in October 1973, showing contributors John Kenneth Galbraith, Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Alan Arthur, Murray Kempton, John Updike, William Styron, Gay Talese, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Philip Roth, Dwight Macdonald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James …
Showing how sometimes shockingly ignorant I am, I had never heard of Hank Stuever until The Washington Monthly asked me to review his new book, Tinsel. It turns out that Stuever is a very popular writer for The Washington Post, and that Tinsel is, and here I quote myself, “a stylishly written and often delightful …
According to a new book by a professor at Duquesne University Law School, Osama bin Laden tried to assassinate President Bill Clinton during a 1996 visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the Philippines. This is something of a scoop, for although Ramzi Yousef confessed to plotting the assassination of Clinton in the …
With no good option on Afghanistan available, it’s clear President Obama last night took the one he considered least bad–and by least bad, we mean the most likely to avoid the Worst Case Scenario. In the president’s case, that would be the “I told you so” scenario, the one that would become possible if America …
A couple of weeks ago in London, at a fundraiser for a prisoners’ rights organization Reprieve, the British writer Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy (better known in the US as The Golden Compass) unveiled an alternative Bible passage that suggested a different fate for Jesus. According to a report in …
In Britain, Borders UK has gone into administration, as they call bankruptcy, and the other big chains, most notably Waterstone’s, are not asking for whom the bell tolls. Meanwhile, in the US, both Borders and Barnes & Noble both posted quarterly losses, and, according to the AP, both “forecast a difficult holiday season, saying competition …
Publishers’ Weekly has come out with its list of the ten best books of 2009. The fact that not one of the authors managed to be a woman would in itself require PW to do some energetic tap-dancing, but the fact that the single best book of the year has been written by a woman …
“Provided that a character is smart enough and manipulative enough,” reads a post on tvtropes.org, “they can get the people around them to do just about anything. Sometimes this can be accomplished by the power of charisma, but other times it needs to be perpetrated through an elaborate scheme. This scheme takes into account everything …
Congratulations to Hank Rosenfeld, my friend and former colleague from Spy, who collaborated on The Wicked Wit of the West, which is a memoir-cum-biography of the great Hollywood screenwriter Irving Brecher, the author of two Marx Brothers movies (At the Circus and Go West), Meet Me in St. Louis, and Bye Bye Birdie!, and who …
Mailer, Buckley, Hunter Thompson–with so many of the literary lions of the era having passed away, it’s always welcome when one of the survivors speaks. Gore Vidal has an interview on theatlantic.com, and it’s pure enjoyment. Not profound, but cranky, perverse, unkind, witty, charming; rather like listening to a very indiscreet grand signeur. Below, an …