Last week New York Times executive editor Bill Keller
“Where are we gonna find those pieces—those neighborhood pieces?” Mr. Hajdu wondered. “I’m not inclined to over-romanticize or glorify the mundane, but what you’d find there in unexpected quarters of the City were wonderful surprises.”
Mr. Lopate, who has written profiles of architecture critic Read More
The New York Times has posted a preview of the Book Review’s lead review from this week: Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter on Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.’s George Plimpton oral biography, George, Being George: George Plimpton’s Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals — and a Read More
Philip Gourevitch, the editor of The Paris Review, can be blunt about the magazine bequeathed to him in March 2005, two years after the death of longtime editor and co-founder George Plimpton.
“I thought the magazine was physically unattractive,” he told The Observer on a recent rainy afternoon. He was behind his glass-topped desk, Read More
Consider the Books Editor. Pulled in different directions by aesthetic judgments, commercial considerations and petty practicalities, this particular B.E., by nature idealistic (he’s not in it for the money, that’s for sure), is worn down by weekly compromise until at last he begins to dread the publication of any book that calls for a serious Read More
McSweeney’s with milk and cookies; host warms up city’s icy literary tribe; Plimpton, Bloom figure prominently
John Hodgman was drinking a smoothie inside the cavernous Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Soon the 32-year-old would switch to rye whiskey. It was 7:30 p.m., and the place was filling up with the 100 or so people Read More
In those days, The Paris Review occupied a one-room ground floor office on the East River with a lion-tamer’s chair hanging from the ceiling. George lived upstairs in a duplex. His first wife, Freddy, and oldest daughter, Medora, lived up there, too, but the first floor of the Plimpton apartment, with its pool table and Read More
Since the economy slid into recession a couple of years ago, New Yorkers have read about high-flying traders and dot-com visionaries brought low by the market forces they thought they’d made obsolete. In the late 1990′s, these people claimed (and some actually believed) that the business cycle had been repealed, that the future promised only Read More
Wednesday 20th
They’re 50! And they love it! They love it, they love it, they love it! (Pardon us-sharp pang of missing Molly Shannon , who was the best thing about NBC’s Saturday Night Live and then just kind of disappeared, as funny women from that show have a rather ominous way of doing.) Read More
Our Dinner With Jenna
My friend Bill (not his real name) and I wanted to write a story about Jenna Jameson, the adult-film star. So one afternoon we telephoned Ms. Jameson’s publicist, who suggested that we meet her client and screen Jenna’s latest film, Dream Quest . That sounded like a pretty good idea. But Read More
It was summer 1996, and the writer George Plimpton was sitting opposite Bill Clinton on Air Force 1 en route to the Olympic Games in Atlanta. Mr. Plimpton, who was on assignment for Sports Illustrated , asked the President to pick an Olympic event in which he could envision competing.
“He answered the decathlon,” Mr. Read More
