WHAT MAD MEN WROUGHT
Here are a collection of some fairly amazing vintage advertisements, collected by the French news site OWNI.eu. Shake your head and enjoy!
Media
INSIDE JOB
After reading Michael Perino‘s The Hellhound of Wall Street, I was wondering if we would ever see the likes of a Ferdinand Pecora who would explicate the figures and practices behind the financial crisis of 2008 as well as Pecora, the Manhattan prosecutor, did during the Depression for the Crash of 1929. Well, opportunities for …
THE MANY LIES OF ROGER AILES
The head of Fox News, the prodigiously jowly former Richard Nixon tub-thumper Roger Ailes, gave an interview to Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast earlier this week. It is instructive to read what Ailes said, because his comments are full of lies of every sort–simple untruths, hyperbolic overstatement, nasty misinterpretation. They show what a low, …
DUMBEST OP-ED ARTICLE OF THE YEAR
Yesterday in The Washington Post, Doug Schoen and Patrick Caddell, two formerly hotshot pollsters, wrote what certainly has to be the most disingenuous, cynical and purely dumb op-ed article of the year. Called “One and Done,” Schoen and Caddell argue the entirely preposterous position that to be a great president, Barack Obama should not seek …
HIGHBROW/BRILLIANT!
New York Magazine rates The Disunion Blog at the apogee of the north-south Highbrow/Lowbow side of its Approval Matrix, and well on the Brilliant side of its east-west Despicable/Brilliant range. Thanks, New York! Just wait for the next few installments–it gets brillianter! The columns are going well. They have received a ton of reader comments, …
THE PROBLEM WITH ELITES
In The Washington Post last Sunday, the social scientist Charles Murray wrote one of those uncommon articles that manages to intrigue and infuriate all at once. Murray’s thesis is that the America’s elite is out of touch with “the real America.” Writes Murray, “We know, for one thing, that the New Elite clusters in a …
THE ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT CONSERVATIVE
The illustrator Zina Saunders is the daughter of Norm Saunders, the prolific illustrator whose work first captivated me in the early sixties when I bought my first pack of the strangely gripping Mars Attacks! cards. Zina has turned out to be a pretty wonderful political caricaturist. As you can see form the cover of the …
BALALAIKAS
Repatriated Russian spy Anna Chapman, posing for Mucovite Maxim. In the immortal words of The Beatles: Show me around your snow-peaked mountains way down south Take me to your daddy’s farm Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out Come and keep your comrade warm I’m back in the USSR Hey you don’t know how lucky …
READING, R.I.P.
In The Guardian, Rick Gekoski elegantly makes the point that literary culture is disappearing. “Supposing that we were back in the year 1974, and playing a game of Humiliation (later made popular in David Lodge‘s Changing Places) in which you earn points by naming books that you haven’t read and which you think the other …
PAUL NEWMAN, NATASHA RICHARDSON & LAUREN BACALL, 1999
Paul Newman, Natasha Richardson and Lauren Bacall, enroute to a party for Talk magazine, August 1999. Photograph by Daffyd Jones. Found on Jeff Wells‘s site Hollywood Elsewhere.