November 14, 1954—Eleven years to the day he electrified classical music audiences by appearing for the first time at Carnegie Hall, Leonard Bernstein made a debut of a different kind: as a master music teacher for the television age, on the CBS arts-and-entertainment show Omnibus. The appearance, in which he led viewers through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony , describing the composer’s...
As the late David Halberstam wrote: “No single family has dominated any major region of the country as the Chandlers have dominated Southern California. They did not so much foster the growth of Los Angeles as invent it.” READ THE WHOLE ITEM
“You get into trouble if you criticize big business. The roof falls in if you criticize Congress. And we’re getting increasingly cautious in criticizing the Administration. The pressures are getting worse.”—Howard K. Smith, ABC News commentator, quoted in Edith Efron, “Television: America’s Timid Giant,” TV Guide , May 1963, collected in TV Guide: The First...
One of the major books of my college years was David Halberstam's The Fifties. The conventional wisdom was that the book rescued the 1950s from its reputation for being Leave it to Beaver-style boring and that it presented the 1950s as the decade that wasn't just before but that gave rise to the 1960s. Well, that's probably true. The Fifties did that. But it also did it while substantially ignoring...
In a wildly popular Quick Hit (2 comments, one of them mine) earlier this week, I quoted two long paragraphs from an article in the Economist , "Contrarianism's end?" , that Brad DeLong had linked to. The more I thought about it, the more important it began to seem. For one thing, it's hard to escape the sense that much of what keeps Versailles going on the individual courtier level is the...
It takes a lot to bring America's greatest living fiction, non-fiction, and journalism writers into one room, but if one woman could do, it's Tina Brown . The Daily Beast editor-in-chief hosted the first ever Norman Mailer Colony soiree at Cipriani last night, to celebrate the non-profit in which promising young writers get to live in Norman Mailer's house in Massachusetts for a week to a month. Guests...
Why Rufus Phillips Matters New Yorker Hat tip: Trish Rufus Phillips, raised in rural Virginia and educated at Yale, was a young C.I.A. officer in Saigon in the nineteen-fifties, a protege of the legendary Colonel Edward Lansdale. Over the next decade, Phillips became that rare thing in American foreign policy—an expert in the politics of another country. (Leslie Gelb, the former Times columnist...
by Tom Ziller Filed under: Trail Blazers Legend Bill Walton has been laid up for a couple years due to serious back issues, which has not only deprived us NBA fans of absurd superlative commentary on ESPN broadcasts, but more important has prevented Walton from getting around much. But a surgery has helped out, and Walton is on his feet. It's only appropriate that those feet -- once cursed -- have...
Next week, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony will throw its first gala hosted by New York media bigwigs Tina Brown and New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick . The gala, emceed by Nation columnist Calvin Trillin , will be held at Cipriani on Tuesday night and will also serve as an awards dinner honoring Toni Morrison with a Lifetime Achievement Award and posthumously bestowing the Distinguished Journalism...
Summary: There is no need to read the daily news when one can remain current by reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. It’s better written than any daily paper, and more informative about today’s events (by virtue of the perspective it provides on them). Many of Obama’s supporters claim that he’s similar to Jack [...]
I'm re-reading my worn copy of David Halberstam's popular history The Fifties (1993). The author is a fine storyteller and his broad survey of major social, political, and cultural changes in the United States is a great way to get back in the groove of thinking about that decade (though...
At the moment, I am listening thru an audiobook of David Halberstam's "The Longest Winter". It is a history of the Korean War - a time in history known to most more thru the TV show M.A.S.H than from any of their history courses in school. One key aspect of the war discussed in the book was the difficult relationship between General Douglas McArthur (American commander of the Far East) and...
David Halberstam got a good deal of his research from former Pentagon analyst and RAND consultant Daniel Ellsberg, so it's interesting to hear from Ellsberg how the Bush administration's use of WMD intelligence is a direct parallel to LBJ's use...
The thought of escalating our involvement in Afghanistan reminded me of an exchange that David Halberstam described in “The Best and the Brightest.” It occurred as plans were being developed for the expansion of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy,...
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