Jamie Malanowski

One of the tropes of New Journalism was itself the attachment of the word New on some phenomenon or personality that had gussied itself up with fern plants or sideburns or a listener-friendly vocabulary, and thus had changed sufficiently enough to warrant a fresh article in a stylish magazine or newspaper section: The New Nixon, […]

Jesse Larner is a learned writer of an unquestionably intellectual bent who has contributed articles to The Nation and appears on NPR and the BBC. He has just written a solid, thoroughly researched, amply annoted book called ForgiveUs Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the American Left, in which he examines Moore as […]

Okay, so what if it is a tad early? Why not write this book now? Sure, there will be endless twists and turns and forks in the road before Hillary could possibly seize the Democratic nomination, but the shelf life of a political candidate is famously unpredictable. Suppose on New Year’s Day in 2004, a […]

Yes, that’s right–blame feminism. We’re not going to ascribe this one to the lack of Jesus in Brian’s life, or the lack of values in the public school system, or to the tax-and-spend liberals who are a minority in Congress, or to soft-headed judges who believe in holding accused criminals for trial instead of summarily […]

Readers will recall that it was Tom Brokaw’s great good luck as a journalist, as a reporter of news, to uncover that back in the 1930s and 1940s, a large mass of young Americans had to suffer, a) the trials and deprivations of the Great Depression, then b) fight a terrible war –a “world war” […]

The book is predicated on Royte’s impulse to follow her own personal waste–her trash, her recyclables, her own individual biological by-products, her contribution to the approximately 232 million tons of municipal solid waste (the EPA, 2003) that’s produced in America–to their final resting places. Royte’s various explorations do seem to fit a certain pattern: encounters […]

Congratulations on your new magazine! This is probably the best start-up since Bobby Guccione Jr. did Spin in the mid-’80s. (Do you know Bob? He and I haven’t spoken in years, but I’m pretty sure he’d recommend me.) I particularly love the title! I’m sure everybody was telling you to call it Al Qaeda Weekly […]

A lot of forgotten men get brought up in this book, and reading does instill a feeling that is small and pleasant (though if a buzz is what you’re after, you’re more apt to be successful just by overdoing the Robitussin a bit.) Vowell, who is a contributing editor to public radio’s “This American Life,” […]

The book really should have been called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Naming Products, Along With Much You Didn’t. It is chock-full of information and examples, indefatigably packaged into types and themes and categories and other time-honored social science boxes that suck the life out of even the most fascinating subjects. The writerstwo […]

For those not in the know, Chris Bell is a one-term Texas Democratic congressman who lost his bid for reelection when the Texas legislature gratuitously gerrymandered him into a district where he had to face another (apparently more popular) Democratic incumbent. With his career nipped in the bud, Bell, perhaps humming the “Me and Bobby […]