If you see Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the street on the No. 4 train in the next week or two, do offer him a cup of cocoa and an hour or two of your time, to listen. He is sad. Neither of the presidential candidates have had the courage, the will, the determination to stick Read More
A veteran press agent assesses the week in ballyhoo.
FAKE FEUD: Desperate for attention after ratings for last year’s duo of big butt (JLo) and big lips (Steven Tyler) began dropping faster than Justin Bieber’s voice, American Idol took a page from the WWE playbook and decided to stage what appeared to be a Read More
Allow me to resolve the the recent debate over “quote approval” with a single word: email. Everyone needs to start doing interviews over email. Whether you’re a journalist or a spokesperson speaking to the media, you’re better off communicating questions, statements or inquiries via email.
By using it when they speak to sources, journalists Read More
“By order of the prophet
We ban that boogie sound
Degenerate the faithful
With that crazy Casbah sound!”
Before we begin, let’s have a few moments of silence to honor the memory of Our Great Prophet, Joe Strummer.
Amen and Peace Be Upon Him.
Now, Read More
Last month, America’s reigning (self-appointed, mind you) journalism expert Jeff Jarvis had some harsh words for the 16,000 reporters who traveled to Tampa to cover the Republican National convention.
“What actual reporting can you possibly do that delivers anything of value more than the infomercial—light on the info, heavy on the ’mercial—that Read More
“A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”
—Rudyard Kipling
At last, Mitt Romney has told us one specific thing he intends to do as president: get weapons to al-Qaeda.
Trying to salvage a week of self-evisceration on foreign policy from the Republican presidential nominee, his leading foreign policy advisors, Eliot Cohen and Richard Williamson, told The New York Times last Friday just what a President Romney would do differently in the Middle East. Their critique included the insistence that President Obama “engage” the rebels in Syria. According to the Times, they did “[stop] short of saying that the United States should provide lethal arms” but favored “facilitating” the provision of lethal arms from other Arab states.” Read More
Welcome to The Bombshell, a regular column about the peculiarities of the fairer sex.
It can’t be easy to be a man these days, what with the gender’s looming end, but thinking about Naomi Wolf’s new and much-ridiculed biography of the vagina has reminded me once again of the main reason why I would not want to be a man, or, make that a heterosexual man. Having sex with a woman is a complicated challenge. It exhausts me to think of it.
Grab any time machine you can find, take it back to any year from the founding of the Republican party until about 1970, and show the bios of this year’s GOP presidential ticket to the party leaders of the past. No doubt, their first response will be, “Weren’t there any Christians available?”
After all, the very first Republican party platform grouped the Mormons in with slaveholders, labeling polygamy and slavery “twin relics of barbarism” and calling for their eradication. President Lincoln later tried to do just that, signing into law the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which specifically outlawed polygamy in the frontier territories. Its sponsor, Congressman Justin Morrill, called the practice “a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world,” and likened it to “cannibalism or infanticide.”
And that’s nothing compared with what some Republicans used to say about Catholics. Read More
Many of us managing Facebook fan pages have noticed something strange over the last year: how our reach has gotten increasingly ineffective. How the messages we post seem to get fewer clicks, how each message is seen by only a fraction of our total “fans.”
It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last Read More
My girlfriend of four years, Sabrina, and I have been in an ongoing conversation about babies. Should we recruit a gay friend, adopt, or go the sperm bank route?
Those are the tough ones. The question of breastfeeding, luckily, is a subject on which we both agree: It’s not going to happen.
In Read More
