I had the happy Father’s Day treat of seeing a performance of the Croton Teen Chorus, featuring my brilliant daughter Cara Malanowski. I had heard Cara sing at any length in more than a year, and it was lovely to hear her high, clear voice in ensemble, and in a solo rendition of I Got …
I received a nice letter from Lewis Burke Frumkes, the Director of the Writing Center at Marymount Manhattan College: “I thought your talk was terrific and highly informative. . . .Mr. Stupid may have gone to Washington, but in my book, Mr. Smart came to our conference in New York.” Lewis, I’m blushing!
One of the best highlights of summer these last few years has been seeing Shakespeare in Central Park with my daughter Molly. We’ve seen Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona: The Musical, Mother Courage, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hair, and, last week, Hamlet. The productions aren’t always great, but it’s always fun …
Had lunch last week with Neal Rechtman, nearly a neighbor from Ossining, and the author of an interesting first novel called The 28th Amendment, which I was happy to blurb. A good guy, and talented, and like me, a onetime student of J.R. Humphreys at Columbia. I hope he sticks with it.
Thanks to an invitation from the inimitable Lewis Burke Frumkes, I delivered the keynote address at the Marymount Manhattan Writers Conference this morning. Lewis asked me to talk about being an editor, so I got to gas on about some of my favorite editorial thoughts, mainly, about how the job of an editor is to …
Had a happy lunch today with HBO’s endlessly delightful Kat Pongracz at Un Deux Trois. She swore that their new series Generation: Kill will be the greatest thing in military-themed TV since Sgt. Bilko. Plus she paid. (From right to left, above: Kat, me, waiter’s finger.)
Nominations for the 2008 National Magazine Awards were announced yesterday, and I’m happy to say that a number of my friends and former colleagues are among the nominees. Popular Mechanics, which is edited by Jim Meigs, my former boss at Us, was nominated for Best Magazine with a circulation between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000, and also …