David Skinner

David Skinner on why the American Heritage Dictionary closed its usage panel this year—and why it existed in the first place.

David Skinner’s shiners.

David Skinner, taskmaster.

I always wanted a nickname, a moniker to set me apart and give voice to the familiar fondness that everyone who knows me feels towards my special character—you know, that way I have, that unmistakable something about me.

It was Big Trash Day in my neighborhood. Notices had gone out that the city’s garbage trucks would pick up practically anything you put on the curb. Busted televisions, cracked porcelain toilets, cheap plastic outdoor furniture, and all your abandoned aspirations too—piles of books you never read…

A few years ago, some friends of mine, weekend musicians, started jamming together and formed a cover band called the Porch Lights. To be honest, their big world tour is a bit slow in developing. Conquering the globe one backyard at a time, they haven’t quite made it outside of our neighborhood,…

A few years ago, some friends of mine, weekend musicians, started jamming together and formed a cover band called the Porch Lights. To be honest, their big world tour is a bit slow in developing. Conquering the globe one backyard at a time, they haven’t quite made it outside of our neighborhood,…

My wife looked at her phone and uttered an expletive. I didn’t know why. Maybe we had failed to pay a bill or maybe Cynthia had forgotten to do something related to work. We’re both high-strung, and I wished for the millionth time that stress wasn’t so contagious, that it didn’t pass so easily from…

My wife looked at her phone and uttered an expletive. I didn’t know why. Maybe we had failed to pay a bill or maybe Cynthia had forgotten to do something related to work. We’re both high-strung, and I wished for the millionth time that stress wasn’t so contagious, that it didn’t pass so easily from…

My wife Cynthia forwarded me two emails in quick succession. The first was from a friend, recruiting volunteers for a cleanup on the Potomac River. It was on a day when I would be out of town. Good luck with that, I thought.

I like to think of myself as a writer-editor on call. If a metaphor needs rewiring or a talking-point has lost its pointiness, I am on it like butter on toast. But when a friend asked me to write an obituary for her mother, I wondered if I was really the man for the job. I didn’t know her mother…

The Oxford English Dictionary is a two-sided Kandinsky, a rare double image of grinding scholarship and popular acclaim. Unavoidably, perhaps, it is more widely esteemed than used. But somehow it has enough cachet that Mel Gibson is producing and starring in a movie about its first chief editor,…

The Oxford English Dictionary is a two-sided Kandinsky, a rare double image of grinding scholarship and popular acclaim. Unavoidably, perhaps, it is more widely esteemed than used. But somehow it has enough cachet that Mel Gibson is producing and starring in a movie about its first chief editor,…

On the third page of We Are Not Ourselves, it is said that Big Mike lives in an apartment on whose walls the only piece of art is a painting of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. If not a friend to the world of fine art, Mike is a great friend to his fellow Irish immigrants in Woodside,…

In my house, summer is a time of dreams. The children are sent to camps, where they are accepted as near bursting with creative, athletic, and mental abilities far too great for mere school. My wife Cynthia takes poster board and sets up a wish list for the family. Each member writes in something…

The worst thing I have ever done on a bicycle was race after a car that had just run a red light and nearly run me down. Pedaling like Lance Armstrong after a fresh IV of oxygen-rich blood, I caught up to the beat-up Toyota at the next pause in traffic, banged on its roof, and then, in a ridiculous…

It was my birthday, and I didn't have a drink to celebrate. A few nights later I made a dinner of pork tenderloin with mushrooms and olives. The only thing missing was a glass of red wine, yet I stuck with water.

As I watched the last few Republican debates, I was distracted, not for the first time, by a most nonpolitical thought: Don't they feel silly all wearing blue suits, white shirts, and red ties?

Friends of mine once saved for a trip to Europe by emptying their pockets at the end of each day and placing any money in a big plastic jug. Occasionally, when short of cash, they had to turn the jug upside down and withdraw a bill or two with a pair of tweezers, but the system worked. After a…

Dear reader, don’t take this personally, but sometimes I think of pursuing another line of work. It’s not you, it’s me. Writing is just so hard. The words don’t seem apt, sentences come loose, a draft seems more deserving of the delete button than your readerly attention. 

I was in my office, happily encircled by little piles of paper, drafting an article, when real life interrupted. 

I got married on April Fool’s Day, but not to make some kind of point, ironic or otherwise. It was just one of the Saturdays on the calendar when my fiancée Cynthia and I were trying to schedule our wedding. 

It was the middle of January, and the ski school was full. The price of private lessons was much higher than we were willing to pay. Cynthia, my wife, was obviously frustrated.  

Over the holidays, I was at my sister’s place. The youngest generation was racing about the house screaming “Not in the face!” as they shot each other with foam projectiles launched from colorful plastic rifles. 

Vladimir Nabokov, who knew a thing or two about the subject, once wrote, “Style is not a tool, it is not a method, it is not a choice of words alone. Being much more than all this, style constitutes an intrinsic component or characteristic of the author’s personality.” I happened to run across this…

Twice now, as I enter my forties, I have picked up a new sport. First I took up tennis, which I have always enjoyed watching and is known to be a game one can play well into the gray-haired years. And a couple months ago I started playing Gaelic football, a bruising, I hope not bone-crushing, but…

Recently I was fingerprinted for a work ID. Sitting at a little table across from a gentleman who, like many federal employees, wore his ID badge and metro card around his neck, I concentrated on rolling my right thumb just so over the scanner between us, from the leftmost edge of the nail to the…

The first writer I ever met was my Uncle Joe. He was tall, with a fading cap of screwy red hair, big mischievous eyes, and a smile that might have been drawn by Dr. Seuss. 

In our dining room, there was a small glass-top table that looked like an old-fashioned pushcart. On it my mother kept several small plants that made a mess of the glass top as they shed their leaves and, when watered, dripped soil from the holes at the bottom of their pots. To clean the table you…

I was on the sidelines at my daughter’s 11-and-under travel soccer game. It had been a successful season, but today they were being outmuscled by a very physical team from Warrenton. With a strong wind blowing against them and only one substitute on the bench, the Alexandria Heat were on the wrong…

A few years ago, I was in New York with my wife, Cynthia. Passing through Queens, we stopped in to see an old family friend of hers who was in town, with a new baby, visiting relatives.

Americans may be having fewer children, but we make a fetish of the ones we have. This is obvious to anyone unlucky enough to have attended a child’s birthday party in recent years. 

My wife Cynthia occasionally interviews our kids, jotting down their answers in little journals. She asks questions like, What was your favorite part of our trip? What was your favorite meal?

The fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published by Houghton Mifflin, was released last fall. In the typecast world of dictionary publishing, American Heritage is the “conservative” dictionary. Developed in the 1960s in the wake of company president James Parton’s failed attempt to…

"You’re going to Spain with or without your kids?” That was the question friends always asked when I mentioned the upcoming trip. And why not? So much of my social life these days revolves around my children that I regularly receive emails identifying the sender, after the signature and always in…

It’s All About the Bike The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels by Robert Penn Bloomsbury, 208 pp., $20

Not so long ago, I mentioned that I didn’t own a cell phone. “But don’t you have, like, a real job?” That’s what people always say. Yes is the answer; full-time employment as an editor and a writer seems real to me, at least.

I remember the first time I talked with a neighbor on our block. He was an athletic guy, not quite 40 if I had to guess. His head was shaven clean, which balding men prefer these days, I think to remove any doubt from your mind as to whether they know they’re going bald. They may not have hair,…

Say goodbye to Mondays. Twelve girls have signed up, the assistant coach has committed to another season, and I can’t actually say no. I will again wake up an hour early on Mondays, go to work early, and leave early to coach my daughter’s soccer team of 6- and 7-year-old girls, the Marauders—though…

I am not a free man. I have kids, a wife, a job. I am, as they say, tied down. This means that no matter where I go, I remain tethered by invisible strings of love and obligation to people who depend on me—and on whom I depend.

"As is" was the description attached to the garage when my wife Cynthia and I bought this fixer-upper a couple of years ago. The house itself was habitable, more or less, but the garage was four slanting walls and a roof with holes, some big enough to pass a basketball through. Our insurance…

Charles McCarry, the spy novelist, has a number of bestsellers to brag about, if not the numbers or recognition of John le Carré.

The best seats at a boxing match, dog show, or Broadway play are the worst seats at Mass. I'm still not sure why, but almost everyone knows it. As an altar boy I used to notice that even at a 7 A.M. weekday Mass with only two people in attendance, the first eight pews would still be empty. If Mass…

A good friend was planning a surprise party for her husband, also a good friend, and she asked me to contribute a poem to the celebration. Now, I was busy at work and behind schedule on two freelance assignments, which unlike this commission promised financial reward. But my ego is fragile and…

Gone Tomorrow

One hundred of anything can technically be called a century, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, but when I heard that a one-day, hundred-mile trip on a bicycle was called a century, I took it to mean a really long time. Instead I should have been thinking, a really long distance.

How to know when you've made a spectacle of yourself? The first hint that I had gone from unremarkable though odd--my natural state--to publicly pathetic came when two young men, complete strangers, drove by my house and called out to me and laughed. I noted their out-of-town baseball caps, bearing…

One early sign of man's superior station in the natural hierarchy was that he got to name the animals--this according to the Book of Genesis. If the job had fallen to me and my wife Cynthia, I'm afraid the story would have ended right there. Instead of a mess of well-named beasts and long chains of…

Growing up among the striving bourgeoisie (teachers, cops, tradesmen), I learned to be suspicious of anyone who was selling something. I remember being told that restaurants served you bread in order to make you thirsty for more drinks, on which their profit margin was high. This was very tricky of…

This year for Christmas, get me nothing. A lot of it.

I Love You, Beth Cooper

I was being interviewed recently by a woman who had mistaken me for an expert of some kind. I am an authority on several subjects--how best to pack the family car for a road trip, for example--but an expert, sadly, on none.

Chicago

Advertisements for the Sony Reader, a hand-held device for perusing e-books, show pretty, natural settings where fans of literature might go and read away to their brain's content. The marketers of portable technology have long suggested a kind of objective correlative between the pleasure one…

It will be spring soon and, more to the point, baseball season. This knowledge brings me some joy and not a little anxiety, due to the birth of my son almost a year ago. I'll see him playing on the rug or, now that his teeth are coming in, chewing on the coffee table, a CD case, or, last week, an…

There ought to be a school, maybe a chain of schools, offering classes for practically-challenged adults. Courses would include basic car maintenance, financial planning, how to throw a dinner party, that kind of thing. The first class I'd take is elementary plumbing.

The Dick Cavett Show: Hollywood Greats

After This

One Saturday a few weeks back, my wife and I had a rough morning. I don't remember the exact reason, but it had something to do with the upstairs bathroom. The toilet and shower had been out of commission for much of the summer owing to a remodeling that afterwards made the rest of our little house…

HER NAME IS SIA. She is one of the most promising singers to emerge on the music scene in the last few years. And Wednesday night at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., she was one of two featured performers of the British musical act Zero Seven. The couple standing behind me didn't know exactly…

MARRIAGE, I had foolishly believed, would save me from ever again experiencing the worst part of being single, the most wrenching, pimple-causing, sleep-destroying vexation incident to bachelor life. I am talking about getting dumped. C'mon, what other reason was there to "forsake all others"--the…

The Dream Life of Sukhanov

SOUL MUSIC, thank the Lord, is back. Well, sort of. A few rising stars, Joss Stone especially, have been wearing their soul on their sleeves, but even more interesting, several classic soul artists have recorded superb new albums. Solomon Burke and Al Green would be the headliners in this…

I AM CLOSE TO LIVING OUT a fantasy I've nursed since maybe the second week of my first year of college. I am returning to my alma mater, not, mind you, to hang around the old campus bar like some aging cad talking up the coeds with their fake IDs (though maybe I'll do that too). No, the political…

ROBERT BRESSON, the French movie director, once said that a movie goes through three births: when it is written, when it is shot, and when it is constructed in the editing room. He was not talking about television shows, but his truism was borne out in the making of Significant Others, the…

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, Charles Reich's book The Greening of America arrived like a tidal wave in the already roiled waters of American public debate. Published as a 25,000-word essay in the September 26, 1970, New Yorker, it elicited from the magazine's 463,000 readers more mail than any single…

WHEN I WAS A KID, my friends and I were always starting clubs. They all consisted of the same four or five guys, but membership was not automatic. To be accepted into the Phoenix Club or The Jets or The Time Travelers, you'd have to complete a rite of initiation. This might involve riding your bike…

Sewanee, Tennessee

SOMETIMES when I hear music on the radio, I think of the fact that other people are also listening. People possibly not as perfect as me. With pasts and regrets different from my own.

THE RELATIVE STAR POWER OF the authors at the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington was easily discerned from the lines of people waiting to have their books signed.

I AM A MEMBER OF the Oprah Book Club, though perhaps not in good standing, having once complained in print that while Oprah Winfrey was certainly a great lover of books, she was no lover of great books.

IT'S THE SUMMER OF THE second year of the Bush administration, trouble is brewing in Iraq and a seat has come open on the Supreme Court. I'm talking about 1990, of course. But the similarities are suggestive, and one lesson to be taken from that year is that a Republican president can nominate an…

"DORIS? She's the one who's always reading War and Peace. That's how I know it's the summer, when Doris is reading War and Peace." Like Doris Klugman in Goodbye Columbus, Oprah Winfrey thinks summer is a fine time for heavy reading. Not long ago, of course, Oprah's name was synonymous with…

NEWSWEEK recently published its ranking of the nation's "100 Best" public high schools. Unlike, say, U.S. News & World Report's rankings of law schools, which can be read as a kind of Michelin Guide for aspiring lawyers, the Newsweek list offers no such concrete consumer service. It may feed the…

SINCE I WAS GOING TO the hardware store to buy some house paint and brushes, my wife asked me to pick up a bag of manure for our plants. A half hour later, I was standing in line in the gardening department with manure on my hands. Farmers must have this problem all the time, I told myself, working…

IF DENIS LEARY'S PERFORMANCES came with stage directions, they might say something like: Exhales smoke to punctuate tirade. Flicks cigarette butt as if littering is his right and duty. Chews gum tortuously, trying to exact punishment for every time gum has let him down by revealing alcohol on his…

IN JANUARY, Universal Studios told Variety that it was going to be a while before the DVDs for the first season of Miami Vice would go on sale. Licensing the soundtrack--with music by U2, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, and Tina Turner, among others--was proving very expensive. What then explains the…

AN OLD WOODEN DESK SITS in my basement, on which I write and edit, with the washing machine on one side and the hot-water heater on the other. It's too square and bulky for a cubicle, a little too large to be carried straight through a doorway. It's also missing a couple of pulls--the screw-holes…

In defeat, envy. Or so it goes with liberals, who lately seem to covet every asset of the conservative movement, from Rush Limbaugh to, I recently learned, right-wing student publications.

IN SEPTEMBER OF LAST YEAR, a small record label in Boston released an extraordinary album, though few beyond a handful of medium-sized newspapers noticed, and several only as the 30-year-old singer arrived in town to promote this quiet almost-masterpiece. Yet, the work began to win fans, due to its…

I CALLED UP Brian Anderson yesterday to ask him a few questions about his forthcoming book, South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias.

GORE (not Al, the bloody stuff) is all the rage on television these days, especially in crime shows and medical dramas. After watching a camera shot dwell fondly on a diseased or mutilated body, the viewer gets to tag along into the operating room or, if he's really lucky, the medical examiner's…

Past Imperfect

NOTHING QUITE SAYS "piece of crap" to me like a rave review from Peter Travers of Rolling Stone. No other reviewer has done nearly as much to celebrate the whole class of overrated art house nullities.

Detroit

FOLLOWING UP on his interview with the Bushes, Dr. Phil today rolled the film on his interview with John Kerry and Teresa Heinz. One could hear the congestion in the senator's voice as he was apparently suffering from a cold during the taping. Dr. Phil was again accompanied by his wife Robin, who…

I JUST WATCHED MSNBC score the debate unanimously for Kerry. Andrea Mitchell pointed out how much the reaction shots hurt Bush--making him look impatient and irritable. Joe Scarborough reported that Bush said, "this is hard work" 11 times. Jon Meacham of Newsweek described Bush's performance as…

THE PRESIDENT and first lady appeared on Dr. Phil today in an interview that was recorded in June. Dr. Phil's wife joined him for the living room heart-to-heart, in which the first couple discussed parenting and home life.

YESTERDAY, September 27, marked the ten-year anniversary of the historic signing of the Contract with America on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. And this fall marks the tenth anniversary of the subsequent (some would say consequent) election of a Republican majority in Congress. So far the…

AFTER HIS 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry had to publicly defend his testimony. He debated fellow Swift Boat veteran John O'Neill, a young pro-Nixon conservative and future author of the anti-Kerry bestseller Unfit for Command, most prominently on the Dick…

In the September issue of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz revisits some of the key events, issues, and policies that, over the second half of the 20th century, led up to 9/11 and the Bush doctrine. Despite its length, the 30,000-word (57 page) article keeps a strong pace, even as it moves from serious…

MOST WRITERS are desperate to coin a phrase--to tattoo a saying on the body of the English language. I myself don't suffer from this craving. It so happens I've already seen an invention of mine taken up by strangers. By now, in fact, my innovation has been circulating for weeks. You may already be…

THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION has not been unified by single policy or campaign promise. ,hey talk of hope and the like, but they don't deliver. It's been more or less a parade of Democratic stand-bys from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Al Sharpton, each in turn giving their spiel. And last night at…

ARE MENTALLY or physically disabled people funny? A dimwitted hunchback like Igor the lab assistant in Young Frankenstein is, sure. But what about a real-life disabled or differently abled person? Take Ron Simonsen in the documentary How's Your News? Watch as Ron flops his slightly lame body onto…

WILCO is not the most successful American rock band working today, only the most storied. What's made them so is a combination of serious musical ambition and a ready supply of conflict. As the band's sound has absorbed ever more punk and electronic layering over its alt-country foundation, they…

OF THE REASONS GIVEN for why the United States hasn't penetrated the anti-American mindset of the Arab and Muslim world, the Arab press has been among the more prominent. One might even say that al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations seem to have done a far better job of using Arab television…

AFTER CATCHING the Michiko Kakutani review in the New York Times last week, I had to experience the simpering, moronic, cutesiness myself. Sheer disbelief drove me to it. And curiosity, myself always being interested in what one writes if one's a bankable writing franchise. And masochism. Did I…

WHILE READING of the late television maverick Jack Paar in the January obituaries, I became curious about his work. Reputed to be smart and entertaining at the same time, he was also a bit of a puzzle: During the height of his fame--when he was on television, with two succeeding programs, from 1957…

THIS WEEK the Council on American-Islamic Relations released its annual report "The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2004." Newspapers (the Washington Post in particular) dutifully gave prominent play to CAIR's claim that hate crimes against Muslims increased 70 percent in 2003.…

HOLLYWOOD HATES BUSH. Richard Clarke hates Bush. Is it any wonder that Sony Pictures has bought the rights to Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke's indignant I-was-there-so-I-should-know polemical memoir?

I HAVEN'T HAD MUCH EXPERIENCE shopping for women's clothing. And on those rare occasions when I've trotted off to buy a pair of slippers or a wallet, say, as a gift for my deserving wife, the mere fact of being in a women's clothing store has made me deeply uncomfortable.

I EXPECTED THE NEW ANTIWAR DRAMA Embedded to be artless, thudding propaganda, filled with commonplace observations passed off as a major exposé. What I didn't expect was a play that might have been written for a convention of conspiracy-mongers. Theater of some kind is what I anticipated when I…

NEXT WEEK, Air America Radio debuts its around-the-clock radio station of the left. Al Franken will play the marquee role, filling the noon-to-3:00 p.m. slot. Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead will run the morning program with Public Enemy rapper Chuck D. And comedienne Janeane Garofalo will be…

AMERICAN STUDENTS are being overworked, says an alarmed chorus of newspapers, magazines, and books. As described by the popular media and even some academics, the crisis is reminiscent of "Sister Carrie" and Industrial era child-labor scandals. "Overbooked: Four Hours of Homework for a Third…

ONE OFTEN HEARS WASHINGTON, D.C., shamed for its sartorial cluelessness. The putdown holds, more or less, that a fashionable dresser would be as out of place among the capital's armies of shabbiness as a harlequined jester in a sea of black turtlenecks.

HOW CONVENIENT that Douglas Brinkley's hagiographic "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War" should be hitting bookstores just as Kerry's star ascends in the Democratic primaries. Less convenient, perhaps, is the fact that another Kerry book is getting hot right now: "The New Soldier,"…

IT IS AS IF the media elite is daring moviegoers to dislike Sofia Coppola and the Best Picture-nominated film she wrote and directed, "Lost in Translation." Teasing a feature article in which directors of last year's Oscar-likely movies talk with each other, Newsweek--the coolest of the…

SHOULD JOHN F. KERRY--war hero, four-term senator from Massachusetts--become the Democratic party's nominee for president, he will likely appear to the nation about as thoughtful as the lines of his ponderously creased face, especially when his gently modulated utterances are compared to the…

IF HOWARD DEAN'S VAUNTED Internet campaign has a guru, it's arguably Howard Rheingold, author of "The Virtual Community," "Smart Mobs," and other works of techno-sociology. Rheingold, once called the "first citizen of the Internet," established himself during the early '90s as the leading proponent…

IN ONE CHRISTMAS MEMORY of mine all the kids and parents are finishing dessert. I light a cigarette. A particularly outspoken relative, who's been bossing the conversation all night, says he's read that cigarette smoke can damage children's hearing. I reply, "No more than the voices of opinionated…

WEEKS BEFORE British flash mobs were quickening to the rings of their cell phones, barking furiously in the steps of President George W. Bush as he visited London, the Booker Prize committee sent its own signal regarding the United States of America. But instead of a thousand shouts and protest…

THE FIRST THING I noticed coming through the doors of the 9:30 Club was a button on the shoulder bag of the woman in front of me. "Regime Change 2004," it said. Next was the long banner hanging behind blues singer Lester Chambers on stage. "Tell Us the Truth," the banner read in tall capital…

THE NEW REPUBLIC and its editor-in-chief Marty Peretz, along with Lions Gate Films, hosted a screening of the new movie "Shattered Glass" in Washington Thursday night. Afterwards, Peretz, Peter Beinart, the magazine's present editor, Leon Wieseltier, the magazine's longtime literary editor, and the…

AMONG THE MOST fatuous devices of political debate, the tactic of disowning "labels" stands proudly: like the Washington hack who catches his breath by saying he does not want to talk about "left" or "right," and then immediately exhales a billowy cumulus cloud of unmistakable partisanship. Next…

THIS HAS TO BE the worst week in Rush Limbaugh's storied career--and yet things could get much worse still. The king of political radio resigned from a side gig doing football commentary on ESPN because of what are being called "racially-charged comments"; at the same time, another story broke that…

I AM A PERSON OF COLOR. Orange, for the most part, but more than a little salmon-y pink as well. I am a person of pattern, too--with many summers' worth of freckles accumulating on my arms and shoulders and other sun-exposed parts. Spotted, a zoologist might say, but not for camouflage, except…

THE PERSECUTION OF SCHOLARS for gender bias, on even the flimsiest evidence, has long been a fact of life in academe. Should one professor write, "Mary entered the kitchen," another boils over with feminist indignation, convenes a panel to investigate, and soon the whole campus is sucked into a…

FOR YEARS NOW Bravo has been the drama department of cable channels with its high-tone movie fare and the precious celebrity-worship of "Inside the Actors Studio" hosted by the plodding, sycophantic James Lipton. It only seems logical that its programming should now have a major gay component, but…

EVERY SUMMER, I come upon the same discovery. Hot weather makes women more beautiful and men more ugly. The former discard layers to reveal a natural loveliness of soft, interconnected curves, while the latter do the same to reveal their top-heavy bodies teetering on grotesquely disproportionate…

The Spoken Word Revolution

AFTER PUBLISHING a brief attack on the literary cheerleading and politically correct logic of a PSAT question recently, I myself became the object of attack from grammarians, a good share of people who think I'm stupid, and violent Toni Morrison partisans. Some days, it's just not worth checking…

THE LATEST ISSUE of O magazine is a sort of feminine response to male fantasy staples like Esquire's "Women We Love" issue. Part romantic advisory, part tribute to the male sex, the issue is complete with obligatory spreads of celebrity guys who are likable but either just a bit edgy (George…

THE EDUCATIONAL TESTING SERVICE, reports the Washington Post, has conceded that a grammar question on a recent PSAT contained an unintended error--making what was the official, correct answer wrong. The question asked whether there were any errors in the following sentence: "Toni Morrison's genius…

TINA BROWN'S talk show on CNBC, which debuted last night, happens only four times a year. Therefore, it might compare with a daily show the way a quarterly journal compares with a newspaper, the former being deeper and less on the cusp of the latest news story. Only it's not deeper than your…

PERHAPS because of the mixed and novel aims of the war in Iraq, no single argument against the war ever came to define the antiwar movement. Rather, the pro- and antiwar camps roughly divided into people who believe in the moral potential of American might and those who don't. The latter have been…

ANYONE STILL DOUBTING the criminal essence of Saddam's regime need only survey the methods employed so far by Iraqi fighters to see that laws, humanitarian conventions, and elementary standards of decency hold no sway with the dictator or the men who carry out his will. Already, there are too many…

COMEDY, performers tell us, is harder than drama. One reason may be that grimness and weight come more naturally than lightness. To achieve the sour gloom of the dramatic performer, one need only take oneself seriously, which is both easy to do and psychologically gratifying. Take yourself…

FROM THE PRO-BUSH sentiments of hockey great Wayne Gretzky to actor Adrien Brody's rousing acceptance at the Oscars, the last few days have finally brought good publicity for the war effort. The patriots are coming out of the woodwork, their confidence in America as visible as the liquid contempt…

STARDUMB QUIZ: Which famous writer is speaking in the interview below, which took place on September 4, 2002 and focused on the then-upcoming war in Iraq?

BLACKLIST. Censorship. The Constitution. Free Speech. This is what the Stardumb phenomenon is all about: The guaranteed right of every entertainer to make an ass of himself as he rushes to the public square with his fresh-from-the-mouth-of-Bill-Maher pronouncements on the issue of war.

THE STARDUMB word of the week is "agreeance." We shout out a thanks to Fred Dunce of Limp Bizkit for the contribution, which he ad-libbed on stage at the Grammys, in defiance of the English language and rumors of a gag order handed down from CBS. Without him, we wouldn't have a Stardumb word of the…

THE PROFESSIONAL OPINION givers say manliness is back. And they may be right. The new economy has been replaced by the wartime economy. High tech's revenge of the nerd fizzled out, while September 11 left us fêting firemen, cops, and soldiers. Manliness has even taken the White House. The '90s…

MARTIN SCORSESE wins the Stardumb play-of-the-week award for this beaut: "It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and, if it does, then only temporarily. . . There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of…

SHOWDITZ JANEANE GAROFALO told the Washington Post this week that a pro-war corporatist media encourages stars to speak out against war in Iraq in order to marginalize the peace movement. Take two: A famous comedienne, speaking out in the media against the war, discerns some ulterior motive in…

"EVERYONE HAS ONE." That's what they (you know, "they") say about opinions. Also that opinions resemble a certain body part, but I'm not going to say which.

SPIKE LEE is an artist, but he's like a painter who cares just a little more about his signature than what occupies the rest of the canvas.

A CHILDHOOD HERO OF MINE, Gary Carter, has been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. And if his canonization proves anything, it's that a person can be great and good at the same time.

RECENT EVENTS--September 11, the war in Afghanistan, and the coming war in Iraq--have rigorously tested one of the perennial cliches of politics: that the Left is for idealists. Dreamers. People longing to change the world--and make it better. It's no longer true. Idealism has become a property of…

THE EXPECTED ASCENSION of Democratic whip Nancy Pelosi to House minority leader has become a surprisingly important issue in another leadership race to be decided today. Pelosi's likely win has helped make the case for Robert Menendez of New Jersey to fill the opening for Democratic caucus…

Skipping Towards Gomorrah The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America by Dan Savage Dutton, $23.95, 302 pages THE AMERICAN SODOMITES have found their defender and his name is, appropriately, Dan Savage. In his day job, Savage writes a wonderfully lewd sex column in which he…

CONSERVATIVES have good reasons to dislike Hawaiian politics.

POIGNANTLY, the red cover of Kurt Cobain's Mead spiral notebook says, "If you read, you'll judge." The statement contains at least one worthy, though perhaps unintended, truth. To wit, reading is not the path to nonjudgementalism. It places one on the road of evidence, which goes straight to the…

SOMEONE TELL Jimmy Carter to give back the Nobel prize. Since the million-dollar Peace Prize was awarded to the former president as an expression of anti-American pique, Carter should politely decline.

THE NOTABLE singer-songwriter Steve Earle became notorious last month when news broke that he'd written a blues ballad about John Walker Lindh--the recently convicted American Taliban fighter from Marin County, California. This week Earle's new album hits stores, and "Jerusalem" contains much else…

I'M A BIG TALKER. Not a boaster or a braggart, I trust, but a voluminous producer of speech. And the number of words I devote to a subject may have nothing to do with its importance. Add to this another unflattering truth, that I'm a complainer. There is hardly an inconvenience I won't turn into a…

THE PREMISE of "Dr. Phil," the new talk show starring Oprah protege Dr. Phil McGraw, is that you can either come on his show and confront your problems, or you can hide in shame. One is the path of courage and change, that most celebrated of goals in talk-show television, and the other is the path…

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN volunteers for heavy duty with his newest album, "The Rising" (Columbia Records). He pays tribute to the rescue workers who marched into the World Trade Center buildings as they tore and burned and snowed down onto lower Manhattan. He looks to capture the sorrow and shock of…

AS YOU MAY know from MSNBC's Normandy-style ad campaign, Phil Donahue, the man who practically invented the gutter genre of talk television, who paved the way for Oprah and the rest, he of the bulging eyes, concerned hand gestures, and sensitive male persona has entered the fray of nightly…

MY FIRST APARTMENT in Washington had an excellent view of the Capitol dome. Except that you had to climb a fire ladder from the hallway outside my apartment door to get to the roof to enjoy it. And even then, after you safely set down your drink in order to pull yourself up by the hands onto the…

DAYTIME TV treats marriage as a division of personal crisis. The networks, meanwhile, crank out ridiculous and contrived game shows in which marriage or something like it is the unlikely and possibly unwanted prize. Both leave one asking that popular question, Where's the love? And the answer has…

A NEW WORK OF HISTORY is published. You review the book on the front page of the book section of the New York Times, saying the author "has dispelled the darkness" surrounding an issue of significant historical interest. Turns out later the book is deeply flawed. Historical sources have been…

THE CD BOOKLET of Eminem's last album, "The Marshall Mathers CD," is lovingly furnished with photos of the little boy from Michigan. The diaper years, grammar school, the pre-peroxide days of teen rebellion--are all represented. But the most winning of these pictures shows the many-named rapper…

FOR THE SECOND TIME NOW, Michael Bellesiles, a historian at Emory University, is being accused of having relied on missing or nonexistent records for evidence in his Bancroft prize-winning book "Arming America." And, for the second time, Bellesiles's protestations and explanations have failed to…

THE LINEUP on ABC last night was a grim treat. Like some awful before-and-after comparison, a show about hot young singles was followed by a show about ill-dressed, unhappy married people. The former was a reality game show, "The Bachelor," in which twenty-five young, attractive women with few…

IF BUSH'S STRATEGY in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a bit muddled, so has American opinion. Although both the administration's stance and the weight of public sentiment favor Israel, they both contain surprising elements suggesting various other possibilities, most of them dreamlike.…

HERE'S MY considered opinion of "Moulin Rouge": It sucks. There's no need to get defensive. It's no big deal. A lot of movies suck. But then again, a lot of movies don't snag eight Oscar nominations. Okay, okay, calm down. The truth hurts, I know. In fact, the movie's suckiness was, in fact, a bit…

ON JUNE 20, 2001, Andrea Pia Yates killed her five young children and set off a wildly huge news story. As the whole English-speaking world surely knows by now, Mrs. Yates and her defenders claimed she had murdered her children during a psychotic episode of postpartum depression. On Tuesday a Texas…

BERNIE MAC was the one stand-up comic featured in the movie "The Original Kings of Comedy" who at the time didn't have regular television work. Steve Harvey had his own show as did D.L. Hughley, while Cedric the Entertainer was a regular co-star on Harvey's show. During an interlude between the…

MICHAEL BELLESILES is a professor of history at Emory University. When his "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" appeared in 2000, it came wrapped in a yellow strip of paper printed with four blurbs--one from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen, who called the book…

MICHAEL BELLESILES is a professor of history at Emory University. When his "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" appeared in 2000, it came wrapped in a yellow strip of paper printed with four blurbs--one from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen, who called the book…

NOT EVEN a war president and his fellow ideologues always get along. For example, House majority leader Dick Armey and President George W. Bush have their differences. Along with many conservatives, Armey doesn't much like AmeriCorps, while Bush does. In fact, judging from the president's…

IN HIS State of the Union Address, President Bush spoke to evildoers and do-gooders. The evildoers, he said, would see their terrorist operations stopped. The do-gooders, he said, would see their efforts infused with federal money and programs. Let's talk about the latter group. "My call tonight,"…

FEW DEBATES are as hard to keep up with as the biotech debate. The first problem is all that science. Sensible people, of course, major in English to avoid terms such as blastocyst. Then there are the competing jurisdictions of federal and private monies, law and commerce, science and religion.…

ON WEDNESDAY the New York Post got religion. The one-word coverline shouted "Outrage." Below, the front page said, "How street vendors dishonor our heroes at ground zero." The accompanying photo seemed unintentionally lighthearted. It showed a smiling, chubby Asian woman standing behind a fold-out…

HOW GOOD was George W. Bush's first year as president? Superb, really. And in comparison with the two most interesting first years in modern memory, Bush's was much, much better than Bill Clinton's, but not quite so brilliant as Ronald Reagan's. Bill Clinton's first year was a mixed bag. The…

THE OTHER DAY I reported that Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's magazine, was angry at America. His writings following September 11 show he is really pissed off that three airplanes should be hijacked and crashed, the Twin Towers should be reduced to rubble, a massive bite should be taken out of…

THE LEAD STORY in the November issue of Harper's was an essay by its editor Lewis Lapham. He'd been, before September 11, to a screening of "Band of Brothers," the Steven Spielberg-produced World War II series on HBO. And he didn't like the experience, not one bit. "Agitprop," he called the show.…

AN "ARTCORE" movie may be hard to define, but you'll know one when you see it at the local art house. Unbearably ponderous, these movies can mope along on almost nothing. For action, they show long-faced characters silently brushing their teeth. For repartee, they have chain-smoking lovers…

IT REACHED ITS PEAK in the early '90s, when Amy Fisher shot Mrs. Joey Buttafuoco: the decades-long transformation of Long Island into a laughingstock. The setting for "The Great Gatsby" became known as a cultural valley of the ashes, home to loud girls with big hair and the Guidos who married them.…

TWO WEEKS AFTER September 11, while the whole world was still checking in with itself, the New York Times called up a bunch of novelists. The paper of record wanted to see if their jobs still had any meaning. "While many temporarily questioned their work," the reporter wrote, "they ended up…

AGING HOLLYWOOD boy-stars, the rise of men's vanity mags, the mania for a hair-free bod going mainstream: These are the usual suspects in a hairless man investigation. But now this trademark mix of literary hijinks and old-fashioned social criticism has broken new ground. Last week, the pursuit of…

I.

ON SEPTEMBER 14, the Department of Defense published a press release on its website saying "Tuesday's tragedies provided an all-too-real test for one of the National Guard's Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams." It was a little feel-good statement publicizing the "first operational…

DESPITE HIS SAINTLY RETREAT from the dirty things of this world, J.D. Salinger remains ubiquitous and annoying. It's been thirty-six years since he published anything, but he is reportedly the object of homage in the upcoming Wes Anderson comedy "The Royal Tenenbaums." And only last year, Sean…

SEPTEMBER 11, A DAY MARKED BY GREAT HATRED, has provoked a whole lot of money and love from a gushing music industry. The television fund-raiser "America: A Tribute to Heroes" may have been sick-making to watch, but it raised upwards of $150 million for the United Way's survivor fund. Individual…

JOHN BUCKLEY WORKS FOR Brainerd Communicators in the Metlife building in Midtown Manhattan, right above Grand Central Station. When he and his fellow employees got back to work the week after September 11, the first topics of discussion were building security and emergency protocol. In the…

My ears are unreliable Oh, they receive sound and transmit the appropriate signals to my brain just fine, but they're undiscriminating: They don't filter out unworthy sounds. Unlike my eyes, which at least can close when something ugly appears, my ears let in just about anything. They pick up the…

Video cassettes and DVDs are the paperbacks of cinema. Just as Penguin has been a ready supplier of literary classics, Blockbuster and the other video-rental outlets have become important purveyors of great movies and television -- and thanks to them you might, on a Saturday night with nothing to…

Last week, the president created an Office of Faith-Based and Community Outreach. Predictably, wall-of-separation alarm clocks, set for a Republican administration, have been going off all over the place.

This Friday night, I am due to have drinks with some friends. But there's a problem: I've been avoiding these people for weeks.

"Live Your Best Life! Start right here, right now," trumpeted the cover of the first issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. One of the purposes of life, the magazine's eponymous "founder and editorial director" wrote, is "not to be good, but to continuously get better, to constantly move forward, creating…

My wife (an office she's held for all of a month now) asked me if I would help out with the thank you notes for our wedding presents. Tradition holds this is the bride's responsibility, but, being a modern guy, I agreed to lend a hand. Which is when the writer's block set in. My mind reeled at all…

The legacy of Evelyn Waugh is curiously divided. Readers of serious fiction revere his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, popularized by a faithful BBC television movie. Wordsmiths, particularly those with a taste for the put-down, credit him as one of the few twentieth-century writers to have…

Michael Lewis's The New New Thing isn't, as its title suggests, about the search for the next great intellectual or commercial break-through. Rather, it's a book-length magazine profile of Jim Clark, the man who founded Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon, and his search for that new new…

I was about 13 at the time. It must have been a Saturday night and I was walking down Bell Boulevard in Bayside, Queens. The sidewalks were thronged with barhoppers, the traffic stiff with cars, the crosswalks crowded, parking spots few. My sister Ann was with me. So was Peggy, a friend of Ann's,…

Black Rock Desert, Nevada

Everyone's a sucker for a free baseball cap. Or a coffee mug. Which is why Silicon Valley salesmen aren't famous schmoozers: They don't need to paint the town red with their clients; almost anything with a corporate logo will do.

Men without chests -- that was C. S. Lewis's striking description of graduates of the postwar English schools, with their faculties trained to dismiss the virtues of patriotism and piety. These Englishmen, Lewis worried, would become lifelong enemies of the sublime, unable and unwilling, when push…

Men without chests -- that was C. S. Lewis's striking description of graduates of the postwar English schools, with their faculties trained to dismiss the virtues of patriotism and piety. These Englishmen, Lewis worried, would become lifelong enemies of the sublime, unable and unwilling, when push…

Kurt Andersen is most famous, or infamous, or notorious, or something for founding and editing Spy, the satirical magazine from the 1980s that pioneered, for instance, the amiable practice of pasting the faces of celebrities into compromising photographs. And now he has written a novel, Turn of the…

Back home in New York recently, I spent a day at the protests. I made a point of getting there early -- before 9 A.M. -- to survey the field.

J.D. Salinger's cultural significance seems beyond dispute. The Catcher in the Rye is a book read even by those who don't read much. When Mark David Chapman assassinated John Lennon in 1980, he said the reason could be found in the novel's pages. When John "Goumba" Sialiano spoke in 1999 of his…

Recently I had the dubious pleasure of seeing my high school on the stage. I saw the musical Fame, which is based on the 1980 movie about New York City's High School of Performing Arts, my alma mater. Like the movie and its so-so television off-shoot, the musical fails to do justice to the…

It was a hundred years ago that Oscar Wilde fell from the heights of literary London to a jail cell in Reading, and there is at present in America a virtual Greek festival of theater, film, and book projects making a cultural moment of the greatest wit ever to grace a buttonhole with a green…