Squired by London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg made a ballyhooed visit to the main control room of the London Underground last week, and came away favorably impressed with the ability of the Tube’s management to use its CCTV system to monitor events on any and every station and platform in the system. …
When I was an editor at Spy a couple of decades ago, we used to run an item called The Spy List, which was almost invariably a simple set of names that were connected by–well, that was for the reader to figure out, or to speculate upon. Basically it was a way we could print …
Does anyone else see the irony in the head of the world’s largest surveillance state meeting his destruction in front of an open mic? Let’s face it, for all the commentary about how Gordon Brown’s harsh comments about a 65 year-old housewife revealed the inner man, what he was mostly guilty of was venting. Struggling …
Most of the obituaries of Fess Parker, the actor who famously portrayed Davy Crockett on television in the fifties and who died yesterday, placed him at the center of genuine coonskin fad, part of the crazy quilt of crazes of that period that included Elvis, hula hoops, drive-ins and that made up pop culture during …
In an article on CNET.com called “Why No One Cares About Privacy Anymore,” Declan McCullagh celebrates (I don’t think that’s too strong a word) the changing mores and advancing technology that seem to be turning the idea of privacy into a quaintly passe concept. Noting that the anticipated storm of privacy objections to Google Buzz …
LET’S NOT REJOICE OVER THE DEATH OF PRIVACY JUST YET Read More »
Click here for a hilarious video from moveon.org. Well, I think it’s hilarious anyway.
I finally caught up with The September Issue, R.J. Kutler‘s documentary about Anna Wintour and the making of Vogue‘s large, vital September issue, this time in 2007. I thought it was great. I loved seeing Anna Wintour–I have never met her, but she reminded me of some of the great editors that I worked for, …
Thank goodness for whatever inspired Kurt Andersen to collect all of the covers of the issues of Spy which he edited, and to put them on his website, and to share them with his former colleagues–because now I can share them with you. Here they are, as Tad Friend dubbed them, “the 71 horses of …
Many thanks to True/Slant’s senior producer Michael Roston, who came to my class at Marymount Manhatan College last week to talk about what makes an interesting blog, how writers can generate more traffic, and so on. Michael is very big on linking, which is why I’m linking to his True/Slant page here. He didn’t seem …
In 2008 a young poet named T.A. Noonan conducted interviews with Stacy Morrison, who is the editor-in-chief of Redbook, and with me, in my capacity as Managing Editor of Playboy, on the topic of fiction in magazines. Ms. Noonan has run the results on her website, which is called Delirious Hem. The results, I think, …