(10:22 a.m.) Tony, our head barista, tells me that Frank Miller is gunning for me and plans to meet me at high noon at Starbucks. I consider myself a peaceable man who doesn’t look for trouble, but Miller is after…
I first met Jerry just after he had dumped poor Joyce Maynard and I tried to comfort her. She may not recall it today, because she was so distraught, wandering on a lonely road in Cornish, New Hampshire, lugging a…
IT’S HARD TO imagine any more equally brilliant yet personally diverse satirists than Allan Sherman and Bob & Ray. Nor any more skillful at mocking American pop culture: Sherman with his Jewish-inflected song parodies written to popular tunes, and Bob…
It all started out so innocently. I just wanted to buy a portable CD player online. It needed to be small, without ear buds or headphones, because I listen in bed until drifting off to sleep to the sound of…
The National Security Agency, severely chastened by WikiLeaks revelations by Julian Assange, and later leaks by Bradley (Chelsea) Manning and Edward Snowden, has announced that henceforth it will bring much more transparency to the agency’s one-time top-secret operations. The NSA,…
Over a 50-year career, I’ve neatly managed to fake my way through five newspapers in New York and San Francisco as a teetotaler, but I’m not proud of it. I wanted desperately to hang out with reporters at places called…
If it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead, it’s probably doubly insensitive to speak ill of a man whose last years were spent miserably but courageously behind a mask, which may account for the over-praise lavished upon Roger…
Most people assume that Tom Lehrer is dead, just as he has always wished us to think. Lehrer is by no means dead, but he turns 85 this month. After he retired at the peak of his fame in 1960,…