Jul 2, 09 | 9:03 AM
How come Jenny Sanford has become a heroine for American women in the new sex wars? Ruth Marcus excitedly expressed the conventional wisdom on Mrs. Sanford in yesterday’s Washington Post, calling her a “model for the wronged political spouse.” Tina Brown, who, as I recall, stole her husband out from under another woman, detailed her keen satisfaction that Sanford had not stood shamefacedly by her husband’s side in the manner of Silda Spitzer and Hillary Clinton (and so many others), and faulted her only for her apparent willingness to take him back—that...
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Jul 1, 09 | 9:29 AM
Apparently half of adult Americans use vibrators, according to a new study. That does not mean that women use vibrators and men don’t. Rather it’s 50% of women and 45% of men. Although, according to the study, “most” heterosexual men use a vibrator on women, who one might suppose are already in that slightly more than 50% category. Only 17% of men use it on themselves for “solo masturbation,” according to the report, which is more or less what masturbation is. The vibrator survey was underwritten by Church and Dwight Co. Inc., who I would have sworn made...
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Jun 30, 09 | 9:23 AM
How many more years in prison did Bernie Madoff get for being Jewish? We might as well get the question out there. It’s surfaced since the Madoff arrest in March and then disappeared: How much is this a Jewish affair? Or, how much does it being an almost entirely Jewish affair change its nature? Certainly the 150 years represent a message beyond retribution and punishment. Madoff’s lawyer, Ira Sorkin, who knows a thing or two about the fate of white-collar criminals, rightly characterizes it as “absurd.” The notion is that Bernie has come to represent the...
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Jun 29, 09 | 9:24 AM
The New York Post has run an almost unaccountable number of Wacko Jacko headlines during Michael Jackson’s peculiar years. But now he’s become the Post’s “Tragic Star,” complete with commemorative poster. One of the most mocked, vilified, and calumniated people of our time has, overnight, been transmuted into…a saint. This isn’t just media death-business sentimentality either. There’s some spontaneous revisionism that’s going on here. It was, it suddenly seems clear, the hard heart of the media, lead by the cruelties...
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Jun 26, 09 | 8:40 AM
While his is an end long foretold, it will nevertheless receive and, by tabloid rules require, obsessive explanation and a search for both evil parties and an appropriately squalid back story. The New York Post and cable news stations were out in front with the drug-related version of events: injections and Demerol and possible other dangerous combinations. The British tabloids were nearly you-are-there in descriptions of the slowing pace of his faltering breathing until the final quiet end. “People close to the Jackson family said he had been given an injection of a powerful...
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Jun 25, 09 | 9:11 PM
Boy, the avalanche of blogs and columns about Mark Sanford’s confession of marital infidelity yesterday have been almost as weird as the governor’s own bizarre, oversharing press conference itself. Sanford not only strayed off the script for politicians admitting they’ve sinned, he turned the script on its head. He said the pro-forma things—how many people he hurt, how sorry he was—but once he started spilling, you got the sense that what he was most cut up about wasn’t that he’d betrayed his wife or been caught with his pants down politically, but that...
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Jun 25, 09 | 9:37 AM
How does Fox News do it? In the face of an incredibly popular Democratic president, a Republican Party and conservative movement in vast disarray, and the natural fall-off for a news network after an intensive election season, Fox News is apparently on track to have its best year ever. WTF? It’s really kind of a blow-out: Fox averages 2.1 million daily viewers; CNN, 805,000 (CNN Headline News adds another 553,000); and MSNBC, 787,000. What does this say about political trends—just as, particularly alarming for anti-Fox liberals, the president's numbers are beginning to...
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Jun 24, 09 | 9:09 AM
Well, is he in the building or not? Is he all better? Why won’t they tell us? And does it matter? Now, it very well may be that many successful public companies are run by crazy buggers—secretive, paranoid, and contrary to a fantastic degree. It may be that Steve Jobs is actually a breath of fresh air. While he may have tried to hide his health issues, he’s certainly open about his peculiarities. Anyway, he very well could be back at work, and, according to mysterious sources, with a new liver (a hospital in Memphis is now claiming to have supplied it). Indeed,...
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Jun 23, 09 | 9:29 AM
More than murder, corruption, war, scandal, it’s revolution that the media adores. Revolution’s the ultimate conflict and the ultimate upset. Even more, the media loves a revolution that produces media—that is, pictures. Even better when you don’t have to send a camera crew, as with the YouTube video of the dying Iranian woman, Neda Agha-Soltan. Curiously, it may not matter whose side is revolting. The 1979 revolution in Iran, even with America cast as the enemy of the revolution, was covered with as much excitement by the US press as the current one. This is surely...
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Jun 22, 09 | 9:39 AM
The best client you could have if you are an intellectual property lawyer is JD Salinger. The second best is JK Rowling. This is because they are both extremely litigious, guarantee great publicity, and because their aura of great virtue, together with the belovedness of their creations, helps them win. Salinger is now challenging the right of a Swedish author to publish in the US a thinly veiled sequel to Catcher in the Rye; Rowling won her recent case against an author who wrote a guide-like reference work about the Harry Potter series. In the past, the 90-year-old Salinger...
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