Jamie Malanowski

I am terribly sad to hear about the death of my friend Jeff Ressner. He was a very good reporter-enterprising, dependable, resourceful, hard-working, smart. A Time editor once compared Jeff to Jerry Rice-“Just throw him the ball, and he runs with it.” He was equally comfortable covering business and entertainment. When I was editing Time‘s […]

There is in publishing the fine old tradition of blurbing, in which the author of a book, and/or his agent and/or his editor, contact certain friends and associates who might be predisposed to like a new book, and to ask them to read the book and, if they like it, to write a short statement […]

Jim DeMint, the radical right-wing former senator from South Carolina and current Heritage Foundation head appeared on a program called “Vocal Point with Jerry Newcombe of Truth In Action Ministries” in early April, where he insisted that “no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves.” Instead, DeMint credited the […]

Yesterday, noted cineaste Rush Limbaugh offered some ex post facto commentary on the selection of 12 Years a Slave as Best Picture. “There’s no way that movie was not going to win!’’ said Limbaugh. “If it was the only thing that movie won, it was going to win Best Picture. There was no way — […]

I don’t know who this toad Kevin O’Leary is, but somewhere in the great media world he has a job opining on the global situation. I don’t know what the rest of his body of work indicates, but this excerpt alone shows that he, and what’s more, whoever hired him, should be sent back to […]

Peter King, the most eminent NFL writer in America, has let it be known that he will no longer use the nickname of Washington’s football team in his column. (I swore off some time ago.) He says he has no desire to insult people gratuitously. Team owner Daniel Snyder is adamantly against change. “We’ll never […]

Elmore Leonard, the great novelist, died on Tuesday at 87. Too often pigeon-holed as a crime genre specialist, Leonard was a brilliant stylist and a peerless entertainer. The critic Janet Maslin noted that while Leonard ‘s novels were frequently adapted for the screen, none of the movies were better than the original novel. I would […]

When I worked at Playboy a few years ago, some of the fellows were fond of a saying: “Don’t mess with another man’s blow job.” Crude, blunt, and yet eloquent, the saying had a lot of applications. Don’t criticize another man’s girlfriend (boyfriend.) Don’t come on to another man’s girlfriend (boyfriend.) Don’t interfere with his […]