Last Saturday, the NYT ran a breezy op-ed by Daphne Merkin, blaming widespread willful delusion for the Bernie Madoff debacle. No wonder. Her brother is the scam's biggest sucker.

Remember how author Daphne Merkin downplayed her brother's connection to Bernie Madoff in the Times this past weekend, describing Ezra Merkin as "a sibling who did business with him," and then suggesting that Madoff's victims weren't really victims, since no one held a gun to their heads and demanded their cash? We…

Author Daphne Merkin penned an op-ed piece for the Times yesterday and once again offered up a few thoughts on the scandal concerning her brother, disgraced money manager Ezra Merkin, who steered more than $1.5 billion to Bernie Madoff and who has since been forced to shut down his funds amid half a dozen lawsuits.…

If you were thinking that author Daphne Merkin would have a good deal to say about the Bernie Madoff saga—and she must considering her brother is Ezra Merkin, the man who lost $1.8 billion of investor cash as part of the scheme—you're probably going to be disappointed by her piece on Tina Brown's website The Daily…

There is something about being in novelist Erica Jong's apartment that makes a person feel a certain degree of—how to put this?—sexual license. Maybe it is to do with the enormous Tom Wesselmann nude that greets visitors in the foyer, all big lips and blonde hair contrasting with dark pubes. Maybe it is just knowing…

In this month's Elle, Daphne Merkin sits down with her former New Yorker boss, Tina Brown, to discuss Brown's new book The Diana Chronicles. It's a strange article. On the one hand, Merkin calls Brown's book "superbly researched and artfully structured" and "compulsively readable," and says it "largely succeeds in…

William Safire's former copy editor Jaimie Epstein, now a "freelance writer," took over his On Language column for this week's New York Times magazine and she is a big heap of "I rolled around in Daphne Merkin's hairshirt" nuts! It's like a mirage imagined by Lawrence Summers—lady takes over an oh-so-manly column and…