OUR MAN IN BOSTON

Apparently having developed adult onset agoraphobia I am disinclined to venture to public spaces. Which provides me with convenient explanation for avoidin...

📷 I can't recall the topic of his New Yorker piece but what I do remember was Nicholas Lehmann relating an anecdote about helping his son with his US Histor...

There is indeed a business like show business. It's the news. Paul Krassner The YIPPIE logo was comprised of three elements— green marijuana leaf, red star ...

The main thing that troubled me about the Nobel being awarded to Bob Dylan was not that his immense talent and momentous body of work were undeserving great ...

Apparently former prosecutor Linda Fairstein's career in fiction began before she wrote the first of her 22 crime novels. As Ava DuVernay 's docudrama on the...

While it is accepted wisdom that the infoshitstream known as the Internet is chock-a -block with galaxies of debris (and worse), it is also the case that the...

The author of a newly published novel, The Flight Portfolio, chats with Robert Birnbaum, your man in Boston, back in 2003 when her publishing life lay ahead...

History repeats itself, "the first as tragedy, then as farce ." Karl Marx I have not understood the the cultural preoccupation (The Walking Dead, The Twilig...

University of Wisconsin alumnus Paul Buhle has edited /authored nearly 40 books. He launched the Students for a Democratic Society's journal, Radical Americ...

The buzzing blooming confusion... There are a multitude of millennial scamsters Elizabeth Holmes, Martin Shkreli Dan Mallory, Anna Delvey,(the Sacklers?) un ...

"Reading, in the deepest, most difficult, ultimately satisfying sense is, and always was, the craft of an elite, but, in spite of what demagogues and anti-in...

On November 18, 1918, Eugene V Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison and disenfranchised for life. Debs presented what has been called his best-remembere...

Some days the personal narrative and accompanying cogitation skews asymmetrical and unruly. Making a report (if asked—as in "What did you do today?") a stu...

On a pleasant day in August, 2004 I drove across Massachusetts to chat with author Charles McCarry. After reading Shelley's Heart, I went on to read his a...

One of the most frequent comments I hear everywhere, right up there with “what’s for dinner” and “I want to be somebody” is “I don’t have time to read”, whic...

"The sports team from my locale is superior to the sports team from your locale" Izzy Birnbaum This year's hot stove league was rather tepid with the Manny M...

“When a man is young he needs many, many books and when he is old he needs only a few books". Rainer Maria Rilke The steady stream of books landing on my fro...

When I learned that my 2004 conversation with Jim Harrison was to be included in an updated edition of Conversations with Jim Harrison (part of the excellent...

There was a time—actually for a lengthy period—that I disparaged the use of lists in culture/ critical journalism, believing they were a lazy way of deliveri...

A New York Times recent profile of this year's National Book Award for Fiction recipient, Sigrid Nunez, is headlined "With ‘The Friend,’ Sigrid Nunez Becomes...