Time was you watched a TV drama, the whole thing got wrapped up in a hour. Perry Mason would meet a client, Dr. Kildare would get a case, Charlie would call the Angels, and sixty minutes later, everyone could go to bed. But in the eighties, things changed. In Wiseguy and Hill Street Blues and …
I am flattered that Boston blogger Brian Kane took a close interest in my Washington Monthly article on surveillance in the UK. He wasn’t entirely pleased–“I think Malanowski too readily dismisses the potential for significant abuse with the argument that there’s no centralization of all these surveillance systems at the moment,” he writes, and who …
In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Roger Angell offers his customary valediction to the baseball season–the year’s not over until Angell sings. Although he rightly singles out Johnny Damon‘s at-bat in the top of the ninth of Game Four as the pivotal moment of the series, the great Angell punts the description a …
My long-developing article on CCTV in the UK and the growing surveillance state there has at long last been published by The Washington Monthly. One of the great pleasures of visiting London in January was meeting so many interesting people and hearing so many thoughtful ideas about my subject, and one of the pains of …
On latimes.com, James Rainey has an article about Amy Hertz, the editor of the Huffington Post’s new books section. “Hertz told me she has had so many submissions — “an embarrassment of riches”– in the opening days of HuffPost Books that she can’t find room for them all on the site, which does not pay …
Frequent reader and correspondent Hugh Cook sends along this item from Mediaweek about the plummeting fortunes of my former employer: “Big cuts are in store at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, which is slashing its rate base a whopping 38 percent as the iconic men’s magazine battles advertising and circulation declines, Mediaweek has learned. Starting with the …
Yesterday in The New York Times Book Review, Slate‘s Internal Affairs Correspondent Jack Shafer favorably reviewed A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America, by Peter Richardson. “Ramparts stands with a handful of 20th-century American magazines–Playboy, the Harold Hayes-era Esquire, Rolling Stone, Spy and Wired–whose glory days continue …
Writing in The Daily Beast, Rebecca Dana contends that by avoiding the use of euphemisms in his announcement of his sexual affairs, David Letterman “has perfected the art of disclosure.” “When David Letterman confessed last week to having had sex with women who work on his show, the real shock wasn’t the affairs themselves (I …
Greg Olear, the author of a novel called Totally Killer that is “part thriller, part satire, part period piece” that has to do with the collision of conspiracy and pop culture in New York in 1991, writes about his “unlikely influences” on a blog on the Powell’s Bookstore site. After citing Weird Al Yankovic, Mad …
This is high season for sexual censoriousness. Facts are in short supply, but conclusions are abundant. We do know that David Letterman has allegedly been the victim of a crime involving affairs with members of his staff. We don’t know whether Letterman was married at the time of any of these events (as if it …
AFTER POLANSKI AND LETTERMAN, CAN “AN EDUCATION” SURVIVE? Read More »