I like to ask friends about the oddest summer job they ever had. One talks about how he used to don a rubber suit every morning at a Sylvania electronics plant in Syracuse, NY, and climb into a tank, where he dipped television tubes into some sort of mercury solution. He now moonlights as a thermometer. Continue reading
As the noted philosopher and rock and roll irritant David Lee Roth once said, “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.” Continue reading
I ran into my friend Jeff Madrick a few weeks ago. Like a rabbit out of a hat, or so it seemed, he whipped from his coat a copy of his new book, Age of Greed. Continue reading
We went to Mount Vernon in Virginia a few weeks ago. It was the first time I’d been to George Washington’s family estate since a whirlwind day tour of Washington, DC, when I was a high school freshman. Our guide then was a fast-talking cabdriver who interlaced his rapid-fire wisecracks with an impressive command of facts and figures, many of which may even have been correct. Continue reading
Last week, an HBO film crew was in my Manhattan neighborhood shooting a movie about legendary record producer Phil Spector, now serving 19 years to life for the 2003 shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson. Continue reading
Travel, they say, improves the mind, a notion once rightly castigated in song by the late, great Noel Coward. It’s “an irritating platitude,” he wrote, “which frankly, entre nous, is far from ever true.” Continue reading
Washington, DC, is a Potemkin village of alabaster and marble where the perpetually stalled and broken escalators of the city’s subway system are a perfect metaphor for the government’s inability to generate positive, upward movement. Yet with all the calumnies that are committed on an hourly basis behind the facade of our nation’s capitol, what had local media there outraged a few days ago? Lemonade. Continue reading
Devoted fans of the popular cop show can probably recite it in their sleep: “In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.” Continue reading
I heard a remarkable thing on the radio the other day and it had nothing to do with a congressman’s nether regions. Continue reading
Sometimes I feel like Gus, the father in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”—you know, the guy who thinks you can cure all maladies with a spritz of Windex and declares, “Give me a word, any word, and I show you that the root of that word is Greek.” Continue reading
Nothing is certain but death and taxes, it used to be said, but in the madcap times we live in, even they’re up for grabs. Continue reading
Remember that scene in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” when Jimmy Stewart arrives in the capital for the first time? The freshman senator shakes off his handlers in Union Station and jumps onto a sightseeing bus, eager to see all the statues and monuments honoring the greats of American history. Continue reading
Who knew Harry Potter’s magic powers were for real? Okay, excuse my Muggle-like ignorance, but I didn’t believe it until I attended a session at the recent National Conference on Media Reform in Boston, organized by the non-profit organization Free Press. This particular panel was headlined “Pop Culture Warriors: How Online Fan Communities Are Organizing to Save the World.” Continue reading
I was considering having myself dusted with ash and measured for sackcloth last week, so many are the current predictions of impending apocalypse. Continue reading
There’s a joke making the rounds and it goes like this: Big Business, a Tea Partier and Organized Labor are sitting around a table. A dozen cookies arrive on a plate. Big Business takes 11 of them and says to the Tea Partier, “Pssst! That union guy is trying to steal your cookie!” Continue reading
“Sell crazy someplace else, we’re all stocked up here.” Continue reading
Forced at gunpoint this weekend to clean out a lot of old paper files in anticipation of some home improvements, I ran across some articles and obituaries I had saved following the death, a little more than five and a half years ago, of the late, great Ann Richards, former governor of Texas. Continue reading
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The new era of hostage politics
Posted on August 8, 2011 by Michael Winship
When I arrived in Washington Sunday, July 31, just as the debt ceiling crisis was approaching its climax, all the flags surrounding the capital’s Union Station stood at half-mast. I blackly joked with my brother and sister-in-law that maybe they’d been lowered to mark the death of the New Deal. (In fact, they honored the recent passing of former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman John Shalikashvili.) Continue reading →