Masters and Servants
On Sunday night, the British period piece “Upstairs Downstairs” finished its three-episode run on PBS. The series, a followup to the much beloved nineteen-seventies British show of the same name,...
View ArticleThe Scene at Ground Zero
When I arrived at Ground Zero shortly after midnight on Sunday, a few hundred people had already gathered at the corner of Vesey and Church Streets, the northeastern edge of what used to be the World...
View ArticleAsk an Academic: The Sixties Underground Press
John McMillian’s new book, “Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America,” is a lively account of an oft-overlooked aspect of the anti-war movement:...
View ArticleMy Mom, the (Literary) Style Icon
This Sunday is Mother’s Day. To commemorate the holiday, I enlisted the help of Piper Weiss, the author of the charming new blog-to-book “My Mom Style Icon.” Weiss was inspired to start a blog after...
View ArticleJoan Didion’s “Tiny, Tiny World”
A few weeks back, someone posted this wonderful, though entirely too brief, interview with Joan Didion on Twitter. From sometime in the seventies, the segment features Didion, with her ubiquitous dark...
View ArticleThe Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt
The author’s transformation from Southern California jock into “sexually neutered androgyne” began the summer after tenth grade, when he abruptly quit playing soccer, pierced his ears, and discovered...
View ArticleWendi Murdoch, Chick-Lit Heroine?
Whatever happens to Rupert Murdoch and his media empire, Tuesday’s colorful parliamentary hearings may yet provide an unexpected boost to the publishing industry. As Ian has already pointed out, CNN...
View ArticleA Few Things Jeremy Irons Doesn’t Like
Today’s Bravura Television conversation, between the New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend and the actors Edie Falco, Jeremy Irons, William H. Macy, and Laura Dern, had a distinctly boisterous mood....
View ArticleAmy Poehler: Why Television is Good for Women
Amy Poehler, the star of the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” doesn’t buy into the conventional wisdom that television is inferior to film. As she told the New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy in their...
View ArticleTen Things You Didn’t Know About “Arrested Development”
For the first time since “Arrested Development” was cancelled in 2005, the entire cast assembled today for a Bluth Family Reunion moderated by New Yorker television critic Nancy Franklin; even Ron...
View ArticleBook 'Em: Chicken Soup for the Criminal Soul
Call us idealists, but at the Book Bench, we believe that reading is a good thing. As Macy pointed out earlier this week, the more one reads, the less …
View ArticleYou’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
In the current issue of The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin makes the case that “the end of men” may be upon us. More specifically, she argues that a …
View ArticleBabar on the Big Screen
Last week, Deadline New York (the latest outpost of Nikki Finke’s growing blog empire) reported that “Twilight” producers Marty Bowen and Wyck …
View ArticleThe Demise of “Cathy”
On Wednesday, the cartoonist Cathy Guisewite announced that, after thirty-four years her comic strip, "Cathy," would come to an end on October 3rd. The …
View ArticleLive from New York, It’s “The Overton Window”
It’s fair to say that Joe Mande is a glutton for punishment. The comedian and author of the blog-to-book, “Look at This F*cking Hipster,” recently …
View ArticleEnglish as She Is Spoke (and Texted)
“The evolution of words is a capsule history of the race,” wrote Dwight Macdonald in his essay “The Decline and Fall of English.” Suffice it to …
View ArticleFact-Checkers: Our Heroes
Fact-checkers are the hidden heroes of journalism, multi-talented polymaths who toil in relative anonymity, both at this publication and others. Which is …
View ArticleRoadside Haiku
Here is another item to add to my list of “things I didn’t know had a name”: bandit signs. In case you, like me, are unfamiliar with the term, bandit…
View ArticleThe Exchange: Rachel Shukert on Memoir Writing, Jewish Identity, and the...
It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the Eurail pass: girl moves to Europe, embarks on regrettable romances with men who barely speak her …
View ArticleIt's National Punctuation Day!
Most of us who are picky about punctuation—we like to think of ourselves as fastidious, thank you very much—are content to silently grumble when we …
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