Author: admin

Boy, is my face red! I gave up watching Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press” some years ago after listening to his (approximately) umpteenth brow-beating of some hapless Republican senator or administration official over the necessity (as he saw it) to rescind the Bush tax-cuts. Now — too late! — I find out that he was,…

My respect for the “Letters to the Editor” page of The Times of London, always high, just went up a notch or two. On Wednesday, columnist Robert Crampton had written of finding somebody’s gold wedding band on a street in Paris at the same time that it was spotted by a young woman. She had proposed…

An account in The New York Times the other day told of a report by New York University, the College Board and selected educators of Asian descent that “pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.” Everybody knows that stereotypes are bad, of course, but this is one that some might mistakenly have supposed to…

One example of the informational land rush that I wrote of last week is the ignominious rush of the former Bush administration spokesman, Scott McClellan, to stake his claim to the lucrative patch of media bottom-land that goes to the guy who can plausibly represent himself as the one-time insider who has turned whistle-blower and finally…

Here’s a headline I noticed in the Daily Telegraph the other day. “Writer in legal fight to protect terror notes.” The story attached to it was of a journalist, one Shiv Malik, who had collaborated with a former terrorist named Hassan Butt on a book to be called Leaving al-Qaeda: Inside The Mind Of A British…

So much excitement in the media about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first Indiana Jones movie for 19 years, should not make us forget that it was the first movie in the series, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), even more than it was Superman or Star Wars three and…

The same day that the California Supreme Court decided that gay marriage, like other kinds of marriage, was a civil right, it transpired that, at least according to The Daily Telegraph, Jodie Foster was splitting with her lesbian “partner” of 14 years, Cydney Bernard, with whom she is said to have two children — born…