André Leon Talley, Vogue’s bigger-than-life fashionisto, has moved away a bit from the mega-magazine (he is no longer editor at large at Vogue but is instead editor at large at the Russian edition of Numero) and is now pursuing reality TV and, on the flip side, books. Mr. Talley will be signing his new 184-page Read More
Maureen Dowd created a minor anti-Semitism scandal yesterday, just in time for Rosh Hashanah. What a shonda!
Apparently, suggesting that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are puppets manipulated by neocon puppet masters can be taken the wrong way. Critics (like Jeffery Goldberg in The Atlantic) allege that the imagery plays into old anti-Semitic stereotypes.
But what about the other imagery lurking in Ms. Dowd’s column? Let’s take a look. Read More
Who’s the character behind the latest bit of Conde Nast roman a clef? What does Barry Diller think of his newly-owned print magazine? What constitutes superficial beauty in a place as fundamentally ugly as D.C.? Did Malcolm Gladwell cause the recession? Does he wish he did? Who is producing the most powerful journalism of the day? And will Robert take K-Stew back? Today’s Power Lunch is brought to you by the Four-Cosmo Circa 2007 Michael’s Expense Account Lunch and Towncar Combo, and offers no real answers to any of those questions. These are your afternoon media briefs: Read More
Fifty Shades of Grey—the S&M publishing phenomenon fueled by discreet e-book sales—is having a slow motion moment in The New York Times.
First, in the Business section, Julie Bosman wrote about the word-of-mouth buzz that caused a bidding war among publishing houses for the erotic novel’s re-release, which ended with highbrow Knopf shelling out Read More
If you’ve never had a winning submission to The New Yorker‘s cartoon caption contest, you’re in good company. It took Roger Ebert 107 tries before coming up with a winning line, while other famous people such as Maureen Dowd, Michael Bloomberg, and Zach Galifianakis Read More
Archbishop Dolan had had it—he took to his blog.
“Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America—not in China or North Korea. In those countries, government presumes daily to ‘redefine’ rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ means.”
The head of the nation’s second-largest Catholic archdiocese and the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a man 60 Minutes had declared “The American Pope” only months before, felt himself staring into the abyss. And the abyss seemed to be staring back: New York was on the eve of voting in gay rights—at the urging of a Catholic governor, no less!—and his months of trying to stop it had come to naught. So he did what a lot of us do and vented on the Internet, seemingly resigned but combative nonetheless.
It was 9:26 a.m. on June 14—10 days, it turned out, before gay marriage would pass. Read More
“But Obama presents himself as a paragon of high principle. So when he flops around on things like ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ or shrinks back from one of his deepest beliefs about the freedom of religion anywhere and everywhere in America, it’s not pretty. Even worse, this is the man who staked his historical reputation Read More
Mostly just to take pictures and hang out in Burqinis.
One of the reasons Bill and Hillary Clinton have proven to be such enduringly fascinating characters is that so many of their actions leave you wondering what they’re really trying to do or say.
Were Hillary’s tears before the New Hampshire primary a sign that, like Ed Muskie decades earlier, she was Read More
Ever notice that the NYTimes.com most-emailed list is slanted toward an older demographic? Maybe because only folks over a certain age—like our Aunt Mabel—still use the email tool. Here’s a quick, annotated guide to what grandma and grandpa thought you might be interested in from NYTimes.com …
1. No matter how many young adult novelists Read More
