Author: Alan Vanneman

Bob Woodward (yes, that Bob Woodward) comes up with a pretty much must read, accusing Donald Rumsfeld of, well, not being a murderer, a liar, or a torturer, but at least a pretty big jerk: “Rumsfeld’s memoir is one big clean-up job, a brazen effort to shift blame to others – including President Bush –…

            Yes, months after the fact, my review of The Social Network is finally up at Brightlights in the new issue, just in time for the DVD release. Also on tap, an even less timely review of Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron in Daddy Long Legs, which (at least) is…

I just can’t stop, can I? At least I don’t. I’ve been marinating, just a bit, in New Yorker history, catching up with Gigi Mahon’s The Last Days of The New Yorker (1988), chronicling the sale of the New Yorker to S.I. Newhouse, and Ben Yagoda’s full-blown history of the mag, Around Town: The New…

Over at the New Yorker, Tina Fey agonizes, at length, over the burdens of being Tina Fey. She’s a working mom, for sure, and she’d love to have another kid, but that would mean “derailing the TV show where two hundred people depend on me for their income, and I take that seriously.” Almost as…

Foreign Policy gives us five reviews of Donald Rumfeld’s Known and Unknown. None of the five dares to tell the truth about Rumsfeld’s many crimes. Such cowardice! This is how establishments protect themselves. Yes, we learn that Rumsfeld was the “worst secretary of defense ever,” but do we learn about the lies he and the…