The New York Daily News, a tabloid newspaper, celebrated the birth of the nation Friday by devoting its first three pages to Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez’s sputtering marriage, a breathtakingly perverse feat.
Among the matters the News invited us to consider was the
possibility that Madonna had interested A-Rod in the Qaballah, thereby somehow endangering his marriage. [...]
There are poems I can recite and poems I merely remember for the ways they moved me. There is music I love but can’t listen to while writing and music I gladly listen to while writing. The distinction doesn’t have to do with quality, it has to do with resonances between the mind [...]
Read More...This is the transcript of another of my weekly Hot Copy podcasts for The Student Operated Press. You can also listen to earlier podcasts.
Whenever you read the lead or off-lead story in a newspaper, whenever a TV anchor interrupts a newscast to bring you breaking news, you can be pretty sure the [...]
In 1972 Edmund Muskie weeps and loses his chance to be president of the United States. In 2004 Howard Dean whoops and loses his chance. In 2007 John McCain croaks Bomb, Bomb Iran and the press chuckles. Not to belabor a point, what is wrong with us?
—DM
You can tell a lot about the turns your life took and didn’t take by remembering the childhood games you liked and didn’t like. I didn’t like Hide-and-Seek because I didn’t think anybody would come looking for me. The more I think about this the more I remember there weren’t too many playmates I [...]
Read More...Union Square has a dog park now. Fritzy would have hated it. He hated organization and contrivance of any kind. In this way he hardly lived up to his name. It was bestowed on him by a bunch of kids in boarding school in West Islip who concluded he’d been born in the [...]
Read More...In a hyper-commercial society that perversely insists on equating quality with sales and turning everything into a horse race it is easy for the best films, books, poems, paintings, plays and music to be ignored. David Gettman sees the Internet as a palliative, and in 1995 with the philosopher Christopher Macann he founded Online Originals, [...]
Read More...We not only don’t see what others see, we often don’t see what’s there or we remember seeing what was never there.
The art conservator Roxanna Lehmann-Haupt and her husband, the bassist Lou Bruno, brought this home to me not long ago. Lou had been watching a television show in which a neurologist showed six people [...]
Why is Rick saying, Here’s looking at you, Babe, in the 1942 film Casablanca so memorable? Is it because of Humphrey Bogart’s body language, the strange immobility of his mouth, the eternally noirish sound of his voice? Or is it something else, something in the words themselves? We don’t, after all, look at each other [...]
Read More...