Straight Up | Jan Herman

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

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 […]

Did he really say it? Yes he did: “This is no longer George Bush’s war. This is America’s war.” — Barack Obama, speaking this morning about the war in Iraq on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolous.” Too bad what Obama said is true to the extent that a heaping majority of the electorate — […]

Oh, brother: A newly revised “science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism” is causing a ruckus in Wisconsin. A state law governing the teaching of evolution was regarded by a local school board as too restrictive, the AP reports. The science curriculum “should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory,” said Joni […]

The Blessèd Reverend Repulski writes: “Dropped into the Albany town library and there noticed Hunter Thompson’s name on the current Rolling Stone cover. Guess what? He fell for the shoe-in Kerry jive too. Some forecasts are too painful to consider. He mistook the citizens of Aspen for the folks. Unwise.” Famous last words from the […]

Have you seen Sorry Everybody? It’s the website that keeps on saying “please remember that some of us — hopefully most of us — are truly, truly sorry.” Such good intentions. So many photo apologies. Such victimhood. So pathetic, exceptions notwithstanding. And such a hit magnet you may not be able to download it.

Few political analysts were more blistering about the Boy King before and during the 2004 election campaign than Kevin Phillips, the former Republican who identified and crafted the “Southern strategy” back in the late-’60s, which wasexploited by Nixon and Reagan and which is now largely responsible for the Boy King’s second coronation. But Phillips, who […]