As Clive Owen put it in the brilliant last line of Children of Men, “What a day!” It started (late) with a very fine lunch at Bar American (the old Judson Grill at Seventh and 52nd) with my old and dear friend from Spy days, John Connolly, now a contributor to Vanity Fair, and his …
Hey, Richard Holbrooke! You’ve been a diplomat since 1962, you’ve been Ambassador to the UN, you negotiated the Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, you’ve been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize seven—count ‘em, seven—times—and right now you’re President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose Bureau of Tourism is, as I …
At “Sunday with the Magazine,’’ a program of interviews and panel discussions presented by The New York Times, five journalists who cover the Obama administration for the paper offered some reasonably sharp observations on the president’s first 103 days. HOW’S IT GOING? “This has been a pretty tremendous period,’’ said Matt Bai, who regularly writes …
A speaking tour that took Paul Krugman from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Westchester Community College brought him yesterday to the New York Times Center opposite the McDonald’s on West 41st Street, for a “Sunday with the Magazine’’ interview with assistant managing editor Gerald Marzorati. In front of a packed house of several hundred …
This morning The New York Post appears with an unbelievable cover story-literally unbelievable. Headlined (at least online) as “AXED GALS TAKE POLE POSITIONS: Pros Stripping Amid Wall St. $lump”, the article by Anka Radakovich (one time sex columnist for Details magazine) reports “Scores of professional New York women stripped of their six-figure jobs are now …
In Slate, Adam Kirsch begins his review of Samuel Johnson, Jeffrey Meyers‘ new biography, with this scary observation: If you get a group of writers together these days, you are guaranteed to hear a lot about death. Not just the deaths of once popular genres, like poetry or the literary novel; those reports have been …
Writing in The Guardian, the estimable journalist Barbara Ehrenreich tells an astonishing story: a man named Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian who was a British resident, has been held at Guantánamo, having been labeled a terrorist after confessing he had visited a ‘joke’ website on how to build a nuclear weapon. Mohamed says he admitted to …
On January 29th, Larry Dubrow wrote an article on AdAge.com called “Magazines Worth Saving,” among which he included Playboy: Playboy has featured some wonderful journalism in recent months (true-crime profiles don’t come much darker and more enticing than Richard Stratton’s recent piece on James “Whitey” Bulger) and continues to showcase as many A-list journalists as …
There are more than 800,000 CCTV cameras in London, about 4.5 million in the UK, more per capita than any other place on earth. In Central London, they are everywhere.
Two final meetings today. I had breakfast with Mark Law (above, clear), a veteran journalist who runs thefirstpost.com, one of the very best websites on either side of the Atlantic. It was fun to trade tales with such an accomplished and experienced editor. Afterwards I journeyed to the South Bank to the headquarters of No2ID, …