I had a great time at a party that Playboy co-hosted last week in honor of my friend and former colleague at Spy, Daniel Radosh. Daniel has just published an amusing and insightful new book called Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, several chapters of which first saw light of …
The other day on Slate, Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar proposed this novel idea: Not only could Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton share the Democratic ticket, but they could have a kind of alternating co-presidency, where one would serve as president, then resign in favor of the other, who would appoint the just resigned …
Columnist and historian Eric Alterman has written a new book entitled Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, which came out this week. Here’s an interview I did with him that appeared on playboy.com. PLAYBOY: Okay, Eric—why are we liberals? ALTERMAN: Depends on what you mean by “we,” Kimosabe. On the one hand, …
The Writing Center of Marymount Manhattan College is marking its 15th anniversary, and I was very flattered that I was invited to the dinner celebrating this milestone that was held at Doubles in the Sherry Netherland Hotel on Wednesday night. I was delighted to see former Spy colleagues Roy Blount Jr. and Patty Marx, and …
Richard Zoglin, a former colleague of mine at Time magazine, has written an excellent piece of history of entertainment history called Comedy At The Edge, about stand-up comedy in the 1970s. Not only has Richard been a longtime observer of the stand-up scene, but he is a top-notch reporter, and the book captures the broad …
Clinton supporters spent the weekend accusing Obama of plaugerism. Obama supporters are already huffily warning superdelegates not to upset the will of the voters, as though Obama’s narrow lead at the two-thirds mark of the campaign is proof of what that will is. Both sides need to chill out and remind themselves that as tempting …
Sometimes good things happen to good people. For a couple of years in the early nineties it was my good luck to work at Spy magazine and to sit in a cubicle located between cubicles occupied by two wonderful people, Joanne Gruber to the east, and Jim Collins to the west. Jim–funny, smart, unflinchingly decent, …
Dana Milbank, a correspondent for The Washington Post, has just published Homo Politicus, a smart and very funny tour d’horizon of Washington and the people there who run our government. In the book, Milbank adopts the guise of an anthropologist to examine their culture and behavior, a very clever and revealing way to think afresh …
So it is President Jack Mahone? Or is it Prime Minister Adam Lang? A website called The Rap Sheet, edited by J. Kingston Pierce, points out that the same stock image shot by photographer Mike Powell is used both on the cover of The Coup, and on the cover of Robert Harris‘s new political thriller, …
I don’t think Norman Mailer made me want to be a writer, but I know Norman Mailer made me think being a writer could be exciting. My parents subscribed to Life and Time and Newsweek, and Mailer was a fixture in their pages, as a subject and contributor (it’s hard to imagine Time and Newsweek …