Cleaning the attic this week, I came upon this trove of photographs of the original cast of Loose Lips, taken during rehearsal, probably in June or July of 1994. The pictures were almost certainly taken by my co-writer Lisa Birnbach. Above, Jimmy Biberi, Sarah Pratter, Ingrid Rockefeller, Keith Primi, Luke Toma and Scott Bryant. Below, …
A wholly personal and entirely idiosyncratic ranking of the what were the very best elements of what, apart from these and a few other gems, was a beast of year: 1.) London. A full week living the life of a roving journalist, enjoying posh circumsances, a limitless credit line, and the company of smart, thoughtful …
On thenation.com, we wonder: how well do you remember the year to come? 1. 2010’s highest-rated TV program was: A. The Apprentice Gets a Shot at Love, in which the member of a talk show’s production staff vie to be selected as the host’s mistress. B. American Death Panel, in which judges Simon Cowell, Michelle …
TMZ has posted this photo purportedly showing JFK on a boat full of naked women. The article details how TMZ received verification from photo experts who conformed that the print was made on paper consistent with the late fifties, that the damage to the print was consistent with processes of the day, that there are …
Beth Lomax Hawes, folklorist, member of the great Lomax family of musical anthropologists, member of the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, among others (that would be Beth in the photo below tucked into the upper right hand corner, above Pete, with Woody to her right), and most memorably, co-author of amusing song …
A couple of weeks ago in London, at a fundraiser for a prisoners’ rights organization Reprieve, the British writer Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy (better known in the US as The Golden Compass) unveiled an alternative Bible passage that suggested a different fate for Jesus. According to a report in …
“Provided that a character is smart enough and manipulative enough,” reads a post on tvtropes.org, “they can get the people around them to do just about anything. Sometimes this can be accomplished by the power of charisma, but other times it needs to be perpetrated through an elaborate scheme. This scheme takes into account everything …
Congratulations to Hank Rosenfeld, my friend and former colleague from Spy, who collaborated on The Wicked Wit of the West, which is a memoir-cum-biography of the great Hollywood screenwriter Irving Brecher, the author of two Marx Brothers movies (At the Circus and Go West), Meet Me in St. Louis, and Bye Bye Birdie!, and who …
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 »
That fine old sixties exclamation “That was wild!” has never been particularly useful to me; I always found it vague. Well, never has it seemed more perfect than in describing Inglourious Basterds, the new film by Quentin Tarantino. It is wild! Funny, tense, violent, exciting–it’s really enormously entertaining. In some ways, it’s even more entertaining …