New Yorker editor David Remnick, who really is a mighty fine journalist in his own right and who has shepherded his magazine through an extended period of excellence, is a man whose opinions on matters journalistic should be paid heed. Except for his opinion about that twee little pastry fetishist Francophile yuppie…
In Slate today, Adam Gopnik, the "Adam Gopnik's kids" correspondent for The New Yorker, explains the fine distinctions of New Yorkerania: "compare Mencken and Liebling, often mistaken as twin stylists, and you see the difference between heavy-handed Teutonic mockery and the ideal ironic, stinging, New Yorker tone."
Blog kingpin Nick Denton turns 43 today. Adam Gopnik, New Yorker staff writer and author, is turning 53. Comedian Dave Chappelle is turning 36. Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin is 66 today. Funnyman Craig Kilborn is turning 47. Herb Allison, the former president of Merrill Lynch and now an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury,…
New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik tells NYMag.com today that he's "addicted" to Kombucha, a Himalayan drink that "tastes like homemade ginger ale, looks like swamp water, and seems half-alive." It's the "elixir of life" and "warder-off-of-all-ills," Gopnik says. One thing it clearly isn't: a truth serum. Although he…
Kurt Andersen, the co-founder of Spy and former editor of New York and Inside.com, turns 54 today. Also celebrating: CourtTV creator Steve Brill is 58, hedge funder Dave Ganek is 45, and 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft is 63. Tori Amos is 45 today. National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry is 40. And Scooter Libby is 58. On…
For about 25 seconds in Wisconsin, Barack Obama spoke some lines pretty much identical to those spoken in 2006 by his friend Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts. The lines were about the power of words in speeches and documents, about how words have more power than they are often given credit for. Of course, now…
A story in Canada's National Post about how Canadian journo Clive Thompson is secretly jealous of more famous Canadian author Malcom Gladwell made brief mention of "a Canadian mafia of print journos that exists in the Manhattan magazine world." There are more Canucks in the New York media world than you might imagine,…
Adam Gopnik is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of three books. After moving to the city in 1980 to attend graduate school, he submitted story after story to the New Yorker, and was met with rejection after rejection until 1986, when the magazine published one of his pieces. Following the arrival of Tina Brown…
Slate does the regular round-up of must-read articles from magazines such as Newsweek and the Weekly Standard. Must skip: Adam Gopnik's essay on the French president's romance. "Cultural elitism," says Slate. (Um, isn't that the New Yorker's whole proposition to those that pretend to read the magazine?)
Last night at Capitale, The Moth celebrated ten years of storytelling. Media polymath Kurt Andersen, Jewy comedian Andy Borowitz, Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, potter Jonathan Adler and Lili Taylor all sat at one table in the front. Harper's figurehead Lewis Lapham didn't show. The main event: The New Yorker's Adam…
Floridian disc jockey Diplo played on Friday night at Hiro for the annual New Yorker Dance Party. If you wanted to see Adam Gopnik shake his strangely wide ass, you'd have been disappointed. But who are the New Yorker readers who appreciate both the sternness of Hendrik Hertzberg and dancing to a song whose refrain…
From the mailbag: "Adam Gopnik is going to be on Jonathan Schwartz's WNYC show this Sunday. I think New York is seriously in danger of a dirty D-bomb, as the two of them together in the same room will certainly exceed critical mass for upper-middle-brow self-satisfied intellectual douchebaggery."
"So who says that book people don't know how to throw a great party!" crowed Nancy Bass Wyden, the glamorous blonde lady who, improbably, is the third-generation owner of New York's most beloved and endearingly crappy used book store. 'Everyone,' said the crowd with their eyes and wan applause. No offense to Nancy or…
Last evening, a genteel literary crowd gathered at the Tribeca loft apartment of Slate editor Jacob Weisberg and his wife, Domino editor Deborah Needleman, to f te the cultural critic and historian Clive James. His new book, Cultural Amnesia, is a kind of highbrow Cliffs Notes for Important Figures of, mostly, the…
For anyone who ever rolled their eyes at one of Adam Gopnik's overly precious New Yorker pieces, or had the misfortune of sitting through Paris to the Moon, his collection of yarns about living with his perfectly winsome children and appropriately acerbic wife in Paris, Vanity Fair contributing editor James Wolcott's …
The Thurber Prize for American Humor was presented last night in a ceremony at — where else? — the Algonquin. The three finalists were America (The Book), by Jon Stewart, Ben Karlin, and David Javerbaum; The Borowitz Report: The Big Book of Shockers, by Andy Borowitz; and Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up…
• Are Men Necessary? is "a very odd, occasionally entertaining mish-mash of politics and sex, biology and Cosmopolitan-ology, gravity and wit, insight and carelessness." We don't care what it is; we'd just like to stop hearing about it. [NYO]
• And Maureen should go away for a while, too. [MW]
• Republican senators…
Yesterday's insolent poking of the New Yorker resulted in more poking elsewhere: "Setting: The M4 Limited. Dramatis Personae: the commuting population of Manhattan, and a male writer of a certain age, wearing an insouciantly knotted ascot, who appears to have recently traveled to France. The population throws off…
The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik takes a city bus and marvels at the mystery of it all. The bus! A protean microcosm where a seemingly innocuous interaction has A Larger More Profound Meaning! The bus is a busbut oh, so much more than a bus! All hail the city bus! (Yay, bus!)
The people on the bus [New Yorker]
Adam Gopnik analyzes last week's events ("Weird, weird week") through Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's "Listening Post," a device that reads bits and pieces of conversations from Internet chat rooms. Sample chatroom psychobabble: "Duct tape and plastic for the White House duct tape, and water in the bathtub, eheh hmmm, I…
