I read the opening lines of Calvin Trillin's op-ed -- written in June 2006, but featured on the NYT website this morning as an op-ed "classic": MY excitement at the news that Senator Chris Dodd, Democrat of Connect…
"We were getting what we wanted..." ... a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person's can…
Said Bob Baxter , the editor of the tattoo journal Skin & Ink, of people who get hand or neck tattoos before they've inked up the rest of their bodies. Why I love this quote: 1. Everything's a "community" th…
Says Barack Obama: "That's an old 60s expression." Yeah, it is: ADDED: You can debate about what ya-yas are. (Everyone who's read the David Sedaris book "Naked" should know Greeks use it to refer to g…
At the end of Alan Jackson's interview with Bob Dylan: My time with Dylan is up and we stand in preparation for my leaving the room. As a last aside, I ask for his take on the US political situation in the run-up to November&…
That was the announcement, 40 years ago, made at 1:59 a.m., the last entry in the transcripts of statements made by Bobby Kennedy's press secretary from the hospital. The first statement is from 2:30 a.m on June 5th. It is a…
Dick Martin has died. “My life has been divided into three parts in the show-business world: nightclubs, television, and then I was a director for 30 years of television shows. And I think the most fun I ever had was nightclubs. …
Matt Damon on James Bond. He, of course, thinks Bourne is better, but he's right, isn't he? Bond is mired in the 60s. I remember a teacher in 1964 who talked about James Bond. Right about when "Goldfinger" came…
So thought Philip Roth in 1960 -- as reported in a 1997 NYT review of "American Pastoral." ( TimesSelect link. ) He argued that real life, the life out of newspaper headlines, was outdoing the imagination of novelists, …
At the LBJ Library , the floors of archives are on beautiful, grand display: And there are three floors of exhibits, which pull you through the history and culture of the 1960s, the time when I was a teenager. Did so much more ha…
Some people do! The place is also dimly lighted, which, once you examine the kitchen nook in daylight, is probably not such a bad thing. The cabinets hold nothing but a six-month supply of powdered milk for Mr. Podell’s cereal, s…
We're done with the individual cities, and now they're cutting together the odds and ends. Sounds bad, right? The best part of the show was the previews for next week, when we finally get to Hollywood, the place we'v…
1. People kind of hate real estate agents. 2. Maybe you really don't have to save that much for your retirement. 3. A developmentally disabled guy reacts to opposition to a group home for the developmentally disabled. 4. An a…
So I put the finishing touches on my notes for a noon hour talk to the Dane County Bar Association and finished my preparation for my two hour 1:20 class and got in the car and drove over to the Monona Hilton where I drove down a…
Oh, my friends, are you in for a treat. Today's Unplayable 45 is vlogged . And what a very vloggy vlog it is: Some links to help you with that vlog. Here are the lyrics to "Here Comes the Night." And here are the …
Bruce Handy thinks not , judging by Peter Ames Carlin's "Catch a Wave." So why is there another book on the subject? Handy has a grip on that: I must own 40 books about the Beatles, another 30 about Bob Dylan, and…
TimesSelect is so frustrating. I can't understand the decision to limit the impact of the columnists. I'm reading David Brooks's column about Hillary Clinton today, and I want to send you over there, but I can only gi…
But now, says psychologist Jeffrey Zeig, it's just not the same . The "cool logic of science" threatens to unseat the "spirit of humanistic activism." [Hunter "Patch" Adams] called for a "la…
I love the idea of a reality show for artists . "In the 1970's when I started in the art world, no self-respecting artist would have stood in line to try to get on a television show," said Jeffrey Deitch, whose gall…
Here 's a picture I found rather disturbing when I was a kid. It's an artist's rendition of Zinjanthropus, a fossil human ancestor discovered in the 1960s. The artist, Peter V. Bianchi, is from Wisconsin, and there is…