It’s Mother’s Day, 5/8/2022. To say the subject of motherhood is fraught in my life would be a gigantic understatement. For a large part of my childhood, I hated her, feared her, and wanted to run away from home. My…
The director Jay Roach, whose 2019 movie Bombshell is just out on Netflix, gained success with a couple of exceedingly lowbrow comedy franchises — the three Austin Powers movies, as well as Meet the Parents and its sequel Meet the…
I’m late in acknowledging UN Day — which took place on October 24 — but hey, no big deal. After all, the UN was tardy in acknowledging the Rwanda genocide. It dropped the ball on the Srebrenica genocide, too. So…
Barry Farber was my pal for over 50 years, since we first met on November 4, 1965. I know the exact date because we were on the air together in a tribute to our mutual friend, the great war correspondent,…
January 29, 1981. It was a mere nine days after President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as president, and this day would bring his first presidential press conference. Safe to say what Reagan said shocked the assembled media of the day. In…
Today’s young people might have heard the phrase “McCarthyism,” and if they have, it’s as some horrible miasma of Nazism and the “killing fields” and other hovering terror of fear. But I was there, and I lived through it, and…
Vladimir Nabokov in Context Edited by David M. Bethea and Siggy Frank (Cambridge University Press, 334 pages, $79.81) The late great Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov amassed a range of critical comments during his 78 years, more than enough to qualify…