OUR MAN IN BOSTON

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

📷 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 so...

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

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 wer...

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

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

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

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

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

The buzzing blooming confusion... There are a multitude of millennial scamsters Elizabeth Holmes, Martin Shkreli Dan Mallory, Anna Delvey...

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

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

Some days the personal narrative and accompanying cogitation skews asymmetrical and unruly. Making a report (if asked—as in "What did y...

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

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...

"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 te...

“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 boo...

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

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

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