A new documentary about Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill has insights for today’s press corps.
New York City
Posted inPolitical Animal
Giuliani’s Leadership Peaked on 9/11. It’s All Gone Downhill Since.
The former New York City mayor genuinely responded to our national tragedy with vision and grace. Now he’s just a grotesque buffoon.
Posted inPolitical Animal
Basket Cases
In his first year on the Court [Clarence Thomas] scarcely ever left the Supreme Court Building on foot, and that was fortunate, in one way, because it meant that he probably never saw the boldly lettered [graffiti] on a Capitol Hill sidewalk across the street. It said, “Anita Told the Truth.” —“The Burden of Clarence […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
The Uprising: Part I
It was so beautiful to see. I feared that in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s dark victory over Hillary Clinton, those who were horrified by the bombast and buffoonery of the bigoted billionaire would sustain an emotional blow from which they would never recover. The psychological impact of the words “President Donald Trump” would be […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
Too Much Blood
A plane hit the tower. Must have been an accident, I figured; something just went catastrophically wrong. I remembered previous plane crashes–the jet that went into Boston Harbor when I was four years old, the USAir flight that crashed at the beginning of senior year, TWA Flight 800–and I figured this was no different. Just […]
Posted inMagazine
The Outcast
I had a distinctly middle-aged moment when I picked up the galley proof of Norman Podhoretz’s Ex-Friends. The publisher’s blurb on the inside cover says: “[T]his memoir of some of the key intellectual battles of the last 30 years offers a rare, firsthand portrait of the New York intellectuals—’American Bloomsbury’ as they have been called—by one of the few surviving members.” […]
Posted inNovember 1990
On Political Books: Manhattan on the Rocks
Moderate black leaders could save New York from the Sharptons and the Brawleys
Posted inMagazine
America’s Bloomsbury
For anyone who has ever worked on a struggling, high-minded publication, the fate of Partisan Review represents the ultimate Walter Mitty fantasy. Here is a publication with a circulation in the low four figures whose every leading writer and editor seems to have been the subject of a biography, a written memoir, or both, and whose editorial […]
Posted inJune 1985
Saving New York’s Subways
One day in late 1983, Bob Kiley and Dave Gunn took a trip to Coney Island. Kiley was the newly appointed head of New York’s huge Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which moves more than a third of the people in the United States who use public transportation. Gunn was the man Kiley was trying to […]
Posted inJuly 1984
On Political Books
What’s next for Ed Koch? Cover boy, that’s what. The ever-visible Ed has never been more ubiquitous than in the months since publication of his controversial autobiography, Mayor. He’s hit the top of the nationwide best-sellers list, he’s done guest spots on such shows as “Gimme a Break” and ‘All My Children,’ he’s milked the […]
