I first met Christopher Hitchens about eight years ago, at a party in Arianna Huffington’s Brentwood manse. Months before, I had given a mostly rave review to his volume of essays Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. He introduced me to his then-dear friend Gore Vidal, who rose to his feet, threw his arms Read More
One of the more remarkable features of our current cultural moment is that otherwise mature adults have been spooked by economics the way children are frightened by thunder. Consider the way the Washington Post Co. has handled Newsweek, one of its flagship assets, which is now up for sale.
Let’s say you own a Read More
What this country needs is a grand unified theory of the hoax.
In the same news cycle as the revelation that Connecticut attorney general and Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal was lying about serving in Vietnam, we learned about Adam Wheeler, who faked his way into Harvard. There was also Guerdwich Montimer, a.k.a. “Jerry Joseph,” Read More
Just getting used to Twitter, e-books and your new iPad? Here’s another paradigm-shifter: In one year-two years, tops-the movie theater will begin its inexorable slide into extinction.
The Federal Communications Commission has just decided to allow the Motion Picture Association of America to send recently released films directly to your television or Read More
Praising Paul Berman’s new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, the estimable and admirable Ron Rosenbaum wrote in Slate that the book reminded him of “those old Partisan Review smackdowns,” of the days “when engagé public intellectuals battled it out over Trotskyism, anarcho-syndicalism, and just who betrayed whom in the bloody streets of Read More
