I don’t know if Joe Scarborough is running for president, but he is sure doing all the things he would need to do if he were. Over the last few years, Scarborough has taken some cues from the Ronald Reagan playbook. Like Reagan, Scarborough has maximized his best natural asset–his amiability–to position himself as a …
Tad Friend, once upon a time my colleague at Spy, has written a family memoir called Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor. It’s elegantly written, with many beautiful and touching passages, and the affection for his family really shows through. One very personal reaction it engendered from me was …
From an article in Editor & Publisher: “Since the financial meltdown began a year ago, journalism jobs have gone away at almost three times the rate jobs have disappeared in the general economy, according to a report by Unity: Journalists of Color. Unity’s 2009 Layoff Tracker Report shows an average 22% increase from month to …
Trawling through photo albums last week, I found these wonderful pictures. Left, Kurt and Kate Andersen; above, George Kalogerakis, Rachel Urquhart, Spike and Graydon Carter. Below left, Molly Malanowski and me. These three photos were taken in 1989 at Kurt’s place in Putnam County. Below right, Molly, earlier that same year, in our apartment in …
Image via CrunchBase So much of the talk about saving newspapers seems to miss the point: it’s not really important to save newspapers, but it’s really important to save news organizations. You can be a smart ass like Chris Andersen and talk about how much `news’ you get from Twitter, but for most important stuff …
. . .on the roof of the famous Puck Building, much of the staff of Spy assembled. These were friends of mine. Photos by Julie Mihaly, courtesy Natasha Lessink. In the top picture, Constance Drayton, Cindy Arlinsky, John Brodie, Ben Svetkey, Rachel Urquhart, George Kalagerakis, Elissa Schappell, Kurt Andersen, Cynthia Cotts, Joe Mastrianni, Graydon Carter, …
I love David Brooks. He is so wise, and temperate, and fair-minded, and even-handed. And reasonable. There may not be a more reasonable man tapping a keyboard in America today. Every time I read one of his columns, I feel a warm, gentle, reasonable arm around my shoulder, gently guiding me towards the path of …
Todd S. Purdum is an accomplished reporter with a long string of successes, and his feature on Sarah Palin in the August issue of Vanity Fair, “It Came From Wasilla,” certainly constitutes a bright new pelt on his pony. But deep in the article, well past the jump, there is a swampy passage that I’m …
Here’s today’s innovative idea, from Newsweek: Hire a comedian to edit the magazine, which happens to be a Tina Brown brainstorm from 1995 (she hired Roseanne Barr to edit The New Yorker), and sell the concept with Spy magazine cover concept, fresh from 1989. (By the way, that’s the head of Scott Yates doubling for …
Sonda Andersson, an art director at SPY, posted on Facebook these photos taken sometime in the summer of 1989 at Kurt Anderson and Anne Kreamer‘s second home up near Carmel in Putnam County. Good to see all these shiny happy faces.