Hear, hear, Stephen Marche. Writing in The National Post, Marche takes a swipe at David Denby, the Snark-hunter: David Denby, a New Yorker film critic, has just released an assault on the bad behaviour of our times, Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal and It’s Ruining Our Conversation. It is one of those thin polemical books …
In Slate, Adam Kirsch begins his review of Samuel Johnson, Jeffrey Meyers‘ new biography, with this scary observation: If you get a group of writers together these days, you are guaranteed to hear a lot about death. Not just the deaths of once popular genres, like poetry or the literary novel; those reports have been …
Three cheers for Walter Kirn–the novelist, critic, and my friend and former colleague from Spy-–who slaps around David Denby in today’s New York Times Book Review in his review of Denby’s new book Snark: Denby pronounces Tom Wolfe and Maureen Dowd masters of “snarky mimesis” and settles on two epicenters of snark located on opposite …
Another busy day, led off by a phone interview with David Davis, a conservative member of Parliament who was shadow Home Secretary. For those who don’t understand the British system, the out-of-power party has a shadow cabinet, so that when an election is called, voters know who will hold post if that party is elected. …
Wednesday was far and away the busiest and perhaps the most exciting day of the trip. At breakfast at the Royal Gardens Hotel, I met Mina Al-Oraibi (above), the Current Affairs journalist for Asharq Alawsat, an international, pan-Arab daily. I had seen Mina on the BBC’s Dateline London program many times, and knew her to …
In the evening I met David Cox at the great, grand Grosvenor Hotel near Victoria Station. David is a writer and former broadcast journalist whose work, oddly enough, I was recognizing just as he was being recommended to me; just the week before last, he wrote what seemed to be an insightful article about how …
It didn’t seem reasonable to go to London to write about CCTV, and not make a pilgrimage to quiet Islington in North London, where, at 27B Canonbury Square, George Orwell wrote 1984. Today, within 200 yards of the building, 32 CCTV cameras are in unblinking operation. The building, by the way, is for sale. I …
At the Wedding Space on East 38th Street last night, Little Brown threw a great party for Ryan D’Agostino in honor of his new book Rich Like Them. It turned into a night for me to run into Esquire staffers, ex-Esquire staffers, and ex-colleagues of mine, who were sometimes one and the same people. Above, …
From my review of Russ Baker’s FAMILY OF SECRETS: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America, Halfway through the concluding chapter of Family of Secrets, Russ Baker mentions, not entirely modestly, that when a colleague heard some of the things he would …
Nobody can predict with any certainty how the first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency is going to turn out, but the last time the country decided to play host to a major financial crisis, the new president and cabinet changed the face of America. In his new book Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle …