Introduction Last week I ran the first part of “James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide,” the first in a series of about, well, thirty-five. If you want to go back and read it, it’s here. The first part ended with me rambling on about how I liked Thurber much more than another *New Yorker* author, Wolcott…
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James Thurber, a reader’s guide
Introduction Some months ago, I thought I would write a longish piece on James Thurber—maybe five or ten thousand words at the most. Well, that was then. I’ve got about thirty-five thousand and counting, including footnotes. I’m going to start running this thing in thousand-word chunks, starting with this one. I’ve been learning about footnotes…
Ross/Fowler Myth Exposed!
OK, normal people can stop reading this post right now. If you do not know who Harold Ross and H.K. Fowler were, you are a normal person and should go to Facebook or You-Tube or whatever it is that you kids do now besides drugs and sex. OK, with that out of the way. let’s…
Jeffrey Toobin: Yes, I am an asshole; why do you ask?
I used to not subscribe to the New Yorker because I couldn’t stand its snotty, Upper West Side Jacobinism. Now I don’t subscribe because of its snotty, Upper West Side neo-fascism. At least, that seems to be the case, thanks to NY staff writer Jeffrey Toobin’s new “theory” that journalism is a crime. Toobin, who…
Chris Christie, everyone’s favorite fat fascist
“I think we have some folks who believe that our job is to be college professors. Now college professors are fine I guess. Being a college professor, they basically spout out ideas that nobody does anything about. For our ideas to matter we have to win. Because if we don’t win, we don’t govern. And…
The Post Re-Bezosed
Why did Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post? Knows God, as the saying goes. As everyone knows, Bezos and Amazon have been totally about the process; the customers sort out the content for themselves. As Felix Salmon notes, Jeff has never had to deal with “talent,” which is what journalists like to think they are….
Words, Words, Words
I’m working my way up to writing a long piece on James Thurber, a writer who was a constant companion of my childhood. I recently tracked down one of his more obscure works, The Beast in Me and Other Animals, discovering as I did so that it includes a handful of “Talk of the Town”…
Rich people like Kevin Roose threaten America, says Kevin Roose
Former New Yorker, and thus writing for New York magazine Kevin Roose exposes the horror by the Bay—San Francisco Bay, where ubiquitous Uber cars and other forms of high-end transportation, financed by dotcom mega-billionaires are undercutting support for public transportation, to the extent that a strike of BART employees shutting down the city’s subway system…
Murderers, left, right, and center
Everybody’s doing it, so it must be good, right? Michael Moynihan leads off the hit parade at the Daily Beast with “How 1960s Radicals Ended Up Teaching Your Kids,” detailing American academia’s endless fascination with murderers—left-wing murderers, of course. They’re so gosh-darn authentic! The murderers in residence currently include Cathy Boudin, already a member of…
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are very different from you and me. They’re totally obnoxious
Chrystia Freeland has scored big time with her portrait of complaining plutocrats in this week’s New Yorker, focusing on Leon Cooperman, an amiable, sort of, billionaire who compulsively refers to President Obama as “a man who never worked a day in his life”—because, according to Cooperman, if you’ve never run your own business, you’ve never…