Here is an Iron Law of the modern era: When rich guys talk about freedom, hold on to your wallet. They are almost always talking about ways to make themselves more free to get more money. Case in point: in an interview with The Guardian on Sunday, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, said that …
The fifth season of Mad Men got off to a fast start, and although a lot was happening, the episode will likely go down as the `Zoo Be Zoo Be Zoo’ episode, after the song that Jessica, Don’s young wife, performed for him at the birthday party she threw for him. As Lauren Streib reports …
I was sorry to see that on Wednesday The New York Times Op-Ed page turned over a third of its precious acreage to Bill Maher so that he could offer some self-serving drivel about how America needs to be more accepting of dumb, vaguely insulting jokes. At least that what he seemed to be saying. …
A writer named Daniel Halper at the conservative Weekly Standard, a publication that brooks no impediment in its reflexive rush to insult the administration, has reported on the publication’s blog that earlier this week, Vice President Joe Biden took the occasion of an official White House reception for the Irish Prime Minister Edna Kelly to …
The brilliant Harlan Ellison on the sad state of the American writer.
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Will Leitch, erstwhile prime mover of the very funny and wildly popular Deadspin blog, once and eternally the target of Buzz Bissinger‘s bizarre and overbearing anti-sports blog blast on Bob Costas‘s HBO show, and now Contributing Editor to New York magazine, where he lends his elegant stylings …
Simon Doonan had a wonderful article in Slate last week about his experience designing the installation for the auction of Marilyn Monroe‘s effects for Christie’s in 1999. Doonan says the process of cataloging her belongings took months, but “Right away, I discovered that Marilyn was shockingly and unimaginably slender. She was sort of like Kate …
The peerless Ronald Searle has died in his sleep in France at the age of 91. Best known for a manically gothic style that invigorated his illustrations of the frantically anarchic schoolgirls of St. Trinian’s, the grinning, lustful oenophiles in The Illustrated Winespeak, the Molesworth series, The Rake’s Progress, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen, and …
Testifying before Parliament today, Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World tabloid, admitted that he and his colleagues hacked into people’s phones, paid police officers for tips, conducted surveillance operations in unmarked vans outside people’s homes, stole confidential documents, rifled through celebrity garbage cans and posed as …
The great reporter and columnist Tom Wicker of The New York Times, died on Friday at the age of 85. In a long and distinguished career, he stood out for his clear thinking, probity, and ethical courage. The defining moment of his career was his performance covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which was …