“The death penalty is probably the one legal issue that everybody has an opinion about,” Scott Turow said. The best-selling novelist is out on the lecture circuit promoting his latest book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “Ultimate Punishment,” which he describes as “a memoir by way of an essay.” I caught his lecture the other […]

Overlooked but not forgotten, artist Peter Max has designed a limited edition of a half-dozen patriotic posters to help raise $1 million for the proposed Pentagon Memorial. Here’s one of the six, titled United We Stand, and here are two others, God Bless America and Peace on Earth. The signed posters, which go on sale […]

It’s already old news that the lemmings have spoken. But now that they’ve elected Arnold Schwarzenegger as governator of Culifornia, what’s next? Running Clint Eastwood for president? Re-animating Sylvester Stallone and running him for senator? That’s too obvious. How about doing something really subtle. Let’s join Sen. Orrin Hatch’s campaign to amend the constitution so […]

Ever since Lorin Maazel took over the New York Philharmonic, critics have lined up for and against and in between. Today’s Financial Times review of their performance of Berlioz’s “Roméo et Juliette” puts the case on both sides as well as anything I’ve read: The maestro “is a bit like that girl with a curl. […]

Here’s a story that might as well be satire because, if true, it’s so nefarious even Gore Vidal might not believe all the dots it connects among Arnold Schwarzenegger, Enron’s former CEO, Kenneth Lay, and the California energy rip-off. It’s also based on facts, unlike the tabloid tale in The Weekly World News headlined: “Alien […]

I see that Lloyd Grove, the new gossip columnist at the Daily News in New York, leads this morning with an item about Sammy Davis Jr. that “rips the zipper off the pint-size entertainer’s gigantic sexual appetites.” Oooh. And he got it all from Wil Haygood’s first-class biography “In Black and White,” just out from […]

By Jan Herman Have the chickens begun to roost? There probably wasn’t a pre-adolescent boy growing up in America in the immediate aftermath of World War II who didn’t mimick Adolf Hitler’s salute as a form of mockery during a game of King of the Hill or its equivalent. But “Little Adolf” Schwarzenegger was a […]

Language is alive and wriggling. Herr Doktor Professor Alan M. Edelson sends along this tale: A linguistics professor was explaining to his class how the use of the double negative varies in different languages. In English, the double negative results in a positive statement. This is not necessarily the case in other languages. But, he […]

Probably no one has more admiration for the poetry of W.B. Yeats, “the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy,” as Clive James puts it in the current issue of The Spectator, than Clive James. Reviewing a new book of Yeats scholarship, which he harpoons under the title

Am I the only one who finds the films in the seven-part series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues getting progressively worse? I think the best film was Scorsese’s on the first night of the series. The rest — beginning with Wim Wenders’ — have been missed opportunities. Very dull, though I love the music. Here’s […]

South African writer J. M. Coetzee, who has long been on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Literature, won the award this time out. Soon after yesterday’s item was posted, betting on Philip Roth because of his Hollywood credentials, a reader sent this e-mail:“Roth? You think? With Naipaul in 2001, Roth tomorrow could […]

Is anybody taking bets on the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to be announced tomorrow? Not being privy to the machinations of the 18-member Swedish Academy, I’d be willing to bet on Philip Roth largely because a star-studded movie of his 2001 novel, “The Human Stain,” is coming out later this month, and […]

So everybody’s suddenly catching up with our remarks a week ago about Harold Bloom’s fit of horror over Stephen King’s elevation into the ranks of the “distinguished” by the National Book Foundation. Here’s Steve Almond on the subject, yesterday in Mobylives. And here’s Our Girl in Chicago, filling in for fellow Arts Journal blogger Terry […]

The death of Elia Kazan at 94 calls up memories of political controversy, along with some of Hollywood’s greatest movies and Broadway’s greatest plays: “On the Waterfront,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Death of a Salesman,” to cite just three. Kazan’s detractors despised him as a man for “naming names” of alleged Communists in testimony before […]

The only existing scale model of the original World Trade Center twin towers has been “painstakingly restored” and is “on view in a darkened chamber at the American Architectural Foundation’s Octagon Museum” in Washington, Benjamin Forgey reports. “The visitor turns a corner at the second-floor landing of the Octagon’s elegant 18th-century stairwell, enters the room […]

Unlike 85,000 of my fellow New Yorkers, I stayed home last night to watch television instead of going to Central Park for the free concert by the Dave Mathews Band (scroll down for a video clip). I also missed the live Webcast of the concert (here’s the setlist), because I was busy clicking between the season premiere of […]

Now I get it. George W. Bush had a secret speech writer to help him with yesterday’s address to the U.N. — none other than the infallible, ineffable Dr. Pangloss. The New York Times suggested as much this morning in its lead editorial, describing the address on the surface at least as “a Panglossian report on how well […]