. Niall Ferguson’s cover story for Newsweek was a journalistic and intellectual fiasco, for him and for Newsweek and Daily Beast editor Tina Brown. It was a journalistic fiasco for read-the-multitude-of-responses-online-and-on-paper. Ferguson now has no credibility as an opining voice in the public square. His intellectual credibility, established as an academic historian and teacher, is […]
Jazz Is: 42 – “The Cure”
. Feeling low, in despair, beset by the boorish and the brutish? There’s a cure for that. Back in May, Julia and I, along with jazz rabbi Charlie K, dropped in on Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, and Jack DeJohnette at the Catlalina Bar & Grill in Los Angeles. The new trio’s tour was billed as a […]
A Memory
I awoke today in the shadowy dim light of the pre-morning, and as I will, I lingered, to feel my body’s not-yet awakening, its comfort still in the homey impresses of the bed, the dawning recollection of its minor aches while my mind reached weakly, moment by moment, to crawl out of its foggy depths. […]
I Apologize
. Jonah Lehrer has apologized to his readers for manufacturing quotations in his latest book, to Michael Moynihan for lying about it, and to himself for self-plagiarizing his blog posts for The New Yorker. Fareed Zakaria has apologized to Time and CNN for plagiarizing a paragraph of an article from Jill Lepore at the New […]
The View from Guatemala: the Olympics
. Our intrepid corespondent in Guatemala, Dercum Over, wanted for insubordination by the bureaucratic and benighted in more parts than you have, offers this rebalancing of Olympic victory bragging rights. Tucked away out of the swirl of things in our mountainous farming village in Mayan Guatemala, my Japanese friend Yurino and I are suffering this week from […]