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Hillary Clinton Attacked by Man From Mars
September 8, 2010Maybe it's a secret fantasy of girl-on-girl action that makes Ed Klein obsess about Sen. Hillary Clinton's supposed lesbian ethos in his new book "The Truth About Hillary." It's hard to know what else he has to draw on. Yelling "lesbian" at powerful heterosexual women has always been the pathetic projection of the menaced male, but it's especially baffling in Klein's case. As the former editor of the New York Times Magazine, with some bestsellers behind him, Klein used to be a workmanlike scribe with glamour aspirations when he was flat-footing around in the Jackie O crypto-sphere. He's not the usual sniper in the Republican stage army, which is perhaps why such paid-up members as the New York Post's John Podhoretz have elected to play smart and trash the book, too. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that misogyny is a sure boomerang.
Kofi Annan, Served and Grilled
September 8, 2010 Spare a thought, in all his troubles, for Kofi Annan's official social life.
Fame Is No Excuse For the Rest of Us
September 8, 2010Russell Crowe's rumble in the Mercer Hotel in New York this week suggests a possible new use for Neverland after the Jackson verdict is rendered. It could be refitted as a rehabilitation facility for stars, CEOs and ersatz billionaires afflicted with the classic symptoms of Narcissistic Celebrity Disorder.
Honor Thy Father
September 8, 2010There's no such thing as a perfectly truthful memoir. Anyway, who would want one? Much of the interest in reading personal history is decoding what's real about a remembered life from the author's baggage of partial understanding or simmering resentment or wishful thinking.
It's Only Publicity Love
September 8, 2010As Tom Cruise's promotional campaign for his "romance" with baby-faced starlet Katie Holmes shifts into high gear, it's running into a brand-new PR problem: No one believes it's for real. Or, no one is prepared to pretend to believe it's for real.
It's Only Publicity Love
September 8, 2010 As Tom Cruise's promotional campaign for his "romance" with baby-faced starlet Katie Holmes shifts into high gear, it's running into a brand-new PR problem: No one believes it's for real. Or, no one is prepared to pretend to believe it's for real.
Death by Error
September 8, 2010The Newsweek imbroglio, coming on the heels of the plagiarism epidemic in newspapers and the CBS National Guard fiasco, is another sharp sciatica pain in the media psyche, but unlike those other reputation-wreckers, this one comes with a body count.
The Which Blair Project
September 8, 2010Until this week, Brits I spoke to in London seemed more excited about the reunion of Cream at Royal Albert Hall than about the election that will decide whether Tony Blair and Labor get a mandate for another five years. Being told every day that Blair would win a big majority cast the national mood into one of surly indifference.
Trapped in the Celebrity Web
September 8, 2010Now that every celebrity has become a human home page, we are assailed by their brand extension at every turn. Each time Martha Stewart announces another new deal it makes me want to slip quietly away and take a nap. In addition to pretending to no longer run her magazine, television and merchandising empire, she has now committed to a 24-hour channel with Sirius satellite radio, a daily NBC-TV cooking show and a spinoff of "The Apprentice." Not content with this frenzy of rebirth, she has stirred up another feds flap -- this one by turning up at the Time 100 Most Influential People dinner at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Time Warner Center instead of staying tucked up at home in her 450-thread-count sheets and locator bracelet.
Reverence Gone Up in Smoke
September 8, 2010 "Secular and the City" is a weird show to be in at the moment. For those of us who came to Manhattan precisely because you're guaranteed never to meet anyone who has read the "Left Behind" series, America's much-celebrated spiritual revival can have its trying moments. The papal marathon of the past three weeks, though, had the paradoxical effect of making the non-born-againers among us feel a little less left out.
