Archives for November 2004

With his latest column, “Good News About Poverty,” David “Bobo” Brooks continues his wayward adventures in idiocy.Making the case for globalization, he points to the “spectacular decline in poverty in East and South Asia” as evidence that the world’s poorer nations are leading a global economic surge. How so? Well, of roughly 472 million people […]

A note on copy editing. A friend who teaches at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication tells me her journalism students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels know so little basic grammar that they can’t tell the difference between a noun and a verb. It’s not that bad at the new, improved New York Times […]

Here’s why, according to him: • You’ve been looking for that perfect gift for your toddler who’s learning to read.• Chances are you can’t bring your PC into the bathroom.• You want to own a copy before Miramax gets a hold of it and changes the ending and makes the story about a French woman […]

With Thanksgiving approaching I thought I was through blogging this week, but Dan Rather’s sudden resignation as CBS news anchor brought out the worst in me: A sentimental memory of my news story about the resignation of his predecessor, Walter Cronkite, nearly a quarter century ago. It appeared on the front page of the Chicago […]

When “Cybeline” had its world premiere last March in Los Angeles at the Walt Disney Hall concert complex, I offered a rundown about its authors, a couple of friends of mine — composer-musicologist-technical-wizard Bill Osborne and singer-actress-artist-lyricist-musician Abbie Conant. The premiere, a multimedia music-theater performance, was part of the cutting-edge REDCAT Musical Exploration Series. According […]

I love it when a critic knows what he’s talking about. … Do you remember what it’s like to turn 30? I don’t. … Our chief ignoramus cancelled agreement between nouns and verbs. … Paul Krugman hoped the next administration would “throw open the records” and not be “too magnanimous” to this one. “I believe […]

Have you read “Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1” by combat photographer Kevin Sites? It’s his eye-witness account of what happened nine days ago in the Falluja mosque where he videotaped a U.S. Marine shooting and killing a wounded, unarmed Iraqi prisoner. Explaining his motives to the Marines he was with during the […]

The redesigned Museum of Modern Art in New York has sent the architecture critics into a swoon. Blair Kamen of the Chicago Tribune echoed the raves of many others yesterday when he called the $425-million renovation and expansion “serene, urbane and blissfully understated.” But even at those prices Straight Up poet Leon Freilich, who attended […]

Since the Central Intelligence Agency is so much in the news these days — what with the agency shakeup by the new CIA chief Porter Goss, his leaked “rules of the road” memo telling agency employees it’s their job to “support the administration and its policies,” and a possible compromise intelligence bill — my staff […]

Clyde Haberman asks: “Have you noticed the large number of plays in recent years, on and off Broadway, whose titles consist of only one word?” And answers: To list a few, we now have “Rent,” “Bug,” “Sin,” “Doubt,” “Stomp,” “Svejk,” “Whoopi,” “Hairspray,” “Chicago,” “Brooklyn,” “Dracula,” not to mention words like “Reckless,” “Wicked,” “Trying” and “Cookin’.” […]

One thing struck me on my vacation in Offlineville that left me dumbfounded. Many old friends, from former editors and current reporters to artists and writers, don’t bother going online. When they do, it’s only to seek particular information. They don’t even Web surf. I tried to tell them how much they’re missing (like the […]

The Red Eye was full to brimming. We landed at JFK and pulled up to the gate in the early ayem. But the gate (a k a “the jetway”) was not there. Apparently our arrival was unexpected, although we’d boarded a regularly scheduled flight. So we waited. And waited. And waited some more. The cap’n […]

Blogger burnout, it’s not. Yet. I’m just hitting the toggle switch for a bit of offline vacation. Back next week. I leave you with some wishful thinking from our poet: IF ONLY George Walker Bush, a Texas gent,Somehow came and went,Not so much a presidentAs an embarrassment.–Leon Freilich EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Kofi Annan, global musicologist? “Today, our subject is music,” the U.N. Secretary-General told his audience yesterday in New York. “What’s that got to do with the U.N.?, you may be asking. My answer is that music has to do with everything.” It’s the “soundtrack” of our lives, Annan said, beginning with “the first lullaby sung […]

So what happened to the overnight reviews at The New York Times? Not having seen any since the first one ran on Nov. 1 in the Metro section of the print edition, I wondered whether my report had been wrong. This morning I asked Jonathan Landman, the cultural editor of the Times, in a gmail […]

Spurred by four collections of essays by A.J. Liebling, which have just been published, Russell Baker recalls an era “when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.” His point, of course, is that that’s not the case today. Nor was it the case by the time Liebling died in […]

The big news at Guantanamo Bay is that a federal judge in Washington shut down the “military commissions,” otherwise known as tribunals, being held on the U.S. base in Cuba. Proceedings were halted against a former driver for Osama Bin Laden, who denies he was a terrorist and disputes his prisoner status as an “enemy […]