The New Yorker magazine’s incendiary new cover caricatures Barack Obama in Osama bin Laden head dress. Michelle Obama is seen sporting an afro and an AK47, and they’re fist-dapping in the Oval Office. The cover article is favorable to the couple, the cartoon’s defenders say, being intended as satire. It’s meant to drum up attention, [...]
Read More...New York’s Hudson Valley and the nearby Berkshires and Taconics are alive with art galleries. When people buy second homes in these
scenic treasuries they look to local galleries to provide them mementos of their new environment. They’re missing a huge bet.
If I were a fledgling or even a seasoned collector of contemporary and recent [...]
Have you ever wondered long after a party about that certain somebody you didn’t meet but can’t forget? This is the subject of Gatecrasher, my short story in the June issue of The Country and Abroad. The beautiful woman whose image accompanies the story is my mother, the artist Juanita Guccione.
Read More...(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 43, one of my regular pod casts for The Student Operated Press)
There’s a crucial difference between balanced reporting and insightful reporting. You can listen to this difference by tuning into the Yes Network and listening to color commentator David Cone, the famously versatile former pitcher who once [...]
Noah Eli Gordon in an end paper in the Spring issue of Rain Taxi says he recently began to read page twenty-six of every book he owns. The more I thought about this quixotic adventure the more it enchanted me. As I compared it to the evening news, it seemed to me infinitely more [...]
Read More...If you’d like to look at the changing face of news, consider your own Google home page. Savor its interactivity. You can organize your news, weather maps, solar systems, art exegesis, you name it, and the list of “gadgets” grows almost daily. You can design your own newspaper.
But it’s no longer a paper, it’s news [...]
It’s often said our government is a cosmology of checks and balances, and lately it’s often said the Bush Administration has labored mightily to subvert it in favor of executive authority. In nature, too, there seem to be checks and balances that humanity labors mightily to subvert.
I have been wondering lately whether advertising has [...]
Columnists are like binoculars. They help you see something
differently. You may not like what you see, you may prefer your
old assumptions, but at least you’ve had a chance to see something from a different angle.
News is a heap of pieces until somebody puts the pieces together. But where a puzzle consists of a finite [...]
(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 40, Del Marbrook’s regular podcasts for The Student Operated Press)
The most frustrating aspect of journalism is its daily failure to challenge society’s assumptions.
When television reporters say General Motors or Ford have decided to downsize, they say something like, “Heavily unionized General Motors announced a plan to downsize [...]
(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 39, Del Marbrook’s podcasts for The Student Operated Press)
Sometimes it’s hard to say just when the heyday of a great institution was. I had the privilege of working briefly for The Baltimore Sun in the mid-1960s. It might not have been The Sun’s noblest moment, but it [...]