Off the Record

Allbritton Communications, which owns seven ABC affiliates, including WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., now wants to own a newspaper.

A newspaper? Didn’t everyone write those old, unprofitable things off?

Allbritton’s paper, a tabloid called The Capitol Leader, will have a circulation of between 20,000 and 30,000, according to Frederick Ryan Jr., Allbritton’s president. It will be Read More

A New D.C. Paper Poaches, Encroaches Cross-Platforms

Allbritton Communications, which owns seven ABC affiliates, including WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., now wants to own a newspaper.

A newspaper? Didn’t everyone write those old, unprofitable things off?

Allbritton’s paper, a tabloid called The Capitol Leader, will have a circulation of between 20,000 and 30,000, according to Frederick Ryan Jr., Allbritton’s president. It will be Read More

Blow by Blow: A Guide to Highbrow Oral Sex Writing and Reportage


Almay Ad (Reproduced in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, 1977)

“The oral-sex craze—and in particular girls’ insistence that blowjobs ‘aren’t sex’—has often been blamed on Bill Clinton and his semantic calisthenics during the Kenneth Starr investigation. But even if teen girls were looking to the White House for personal guidance, was it really Bubba Read More

Caitlin Flanagan to Housewives: Please Eat the Damn Daisies

“That’s Caitlin Flanagan,” a female journalist hissed to me at a party in Los Angeles, indicating the famously self-proclaimed anti-feminist—then not yet a staff writer for The New Yorker—perched in the general vicinity of a glinting swimming pool. One got the feeling she wouldn’t have minded flinging Ms. Flanagan into the deep end.

Read More

Caitlin Flanagan to Housewives: Please Eat the Damn Daisies

“That’s Caitlin Flanagan,” a female journalist hissed to me at a party in Los Angeles, indicating the famously self-proclaimed anti-feminist—then not yet a staff writer for The New Yorker—perched in the general vicinity of a glinting swimming pool. One got the feeling she wouldn’t have minded flinging Ms. Flanagan into the deep end.

We weren’t Read More

The Anti-Feminist Mystique

The cardinal rule to leading a happy life is that you must never, under any circumstances, Google yourself.” Newly minted New Yorker staff writer Caitlin Flanagan-provocatrice, chronicler of contemporary domestic life, self-described anti-feminist-was speaking on the phone from her home in Los Angeles.

She was discussing what she has learned in the aftermath of her Read More