This is going to be fun. A trio of controversy-courting female journalists is joining the Jewish culture webzine, Tablet. Daphne Merkin, who wrote about her life in therapy for the New York Times Magazine and learned the art of self-exposure from Tina Brown, has been named movie critic, and Elizabeth Wurtzel, who became a literary Read More
In July of 2007, comedian Michael Showalter was at a bar in Park Slope doing stand-up about an unwitting experience he’d had with a prescription drug called Seroquel.
The scenario: Mr. Showalter couldn’t fall asleep one night thanks to some noisy construction outside his Flatbush Avenue apartment, so his girlfriend suggested he take one Read More
“One of the things that starts happening when you reach your 50s and 60s is a lot of people you love start dying,” Erica Jong said last night during her book party at the New York Yacht Club near Times Square. Dressed in a bright red button-down with black epaulettes and handsomely diamond-studded flannel slippers, Read More
Yesterday, Media Mob reported the baffling fact that this photo of bonobos doing it had been used as the cover of two totally unrelated recently published books: Susan Squire’s I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage and Francis Levy’s independently-published novel about sex and carnality Erotomania. We also reported that Read More
Two new books that came out days apart but have absolutely nothing to do with each other both feature on their covers the same photo of two bonobos having sex with each other in the missionary position. The photo is a pretty famous black-and-white one taken by the primatologist Frans de Waal; the books Read More
Last month, the editors of The New York Times Magazine proclaimed their contributing writer Daphne Merkin “one of the most daring and ruminative writers of our time” on the table-of-contents page. Ms. Merkin’s brief essay in that week’s issue plunged into a new and scary kind of cosmetic surgery for women: “These are cruel times Read More
In the Jan. 8 issue of The
New Yorker, Daphne Merkin describes her multiple stays on the psychiatric
wards of several institutions. She tells us of her desire to die, her fierce
and unremitting attraction to death, describing the boredom, the flatness, the
grayness of her hospitalized days. The piece is written with exquisite control, Read More
The third week of April was National TV Turn-Off Week at our house. For those of you who didn’t receive the flier from my daughter’s school, you were expected to shut your TV off and go cold turkey for the next two weeks. No Today show in the morning, no lunchtime war updates on CNN, Read More
I’m going to interrupt my impeachment coverage this week in part because there’s not much new to say about the procedural wrangles that have led up to the depositions, which (as of this writing) are still under wraps. But also because I have some remarkable news to report about the results of a perhaps even Read More
Jeffrey Kittay, editor in chief of Lingua Franca, has finally found himself an editor for his newest venture, University Business , just as the first issue of the magazine ships to readers. Patrick Clinton, a senior editor at Men’s Journal and a former professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, will take Read More
