“I embody the gag reflex.” — Doug Marlette, R.I.P.
Doug Marlette, 57, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist and creator of Kudzu, died today in a car crash in Mississippi. Doug was one of the nineteen baby boomers whose stories I combined in My Generation. His part of it, based on a series of interviews conducted in 1999, is scattered throughout that book. I’ve gathered […]
Frank Talk
I have a new favorite blog, The Wealth Report by Robert Frank, author of Richistan. In today’s post, he comments on my recent feature in Contribute about the bull market Naming Rights. “If you truly want to make the world a better place, please don’t clutter it up with more plaques and name tags,” Frank […]
Schadenschwarzmanfreude
A Google search of 740 Park prince Steve Schwarzman’s name and the phrase “conspicuous consumption” yields 159 hits this morning, after a week in which the newly issued stock in the Blackstone Group briefly soared and then swooned to beneath its initial offering price. But cheer up, Steve! Sure you’ve lost a billion or so […]
(Kill the) Chill Bill
The following letter came from The Author’s Guild yesterday. My response to it follows. There’s been a sudden and alarming push in the New York State Legislature to pass a bill that would create a posthumous “right of publicity” for anyone who died since Jan. 1, 1938. The bills would give heirs the right to […]
A Horse is a Horse, Of Course, Of Course
I just heard about an article called “Literary Censorship at the Met?”, which apparently ran last week in Publishers Weekly. It is the most pointed piece yet on the contretemps that resulted from the brief banning of Nicholas Fox Weber‘s The Clarks of Cooperstown(which was written to coincide with an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum […]
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
The Blackstone Group’s planned sale of shares to the public has raised a predictable hue and cry focusing on the likely multi-billion-dollar reward its founders, Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson, will walk away with. As I learned last week, when several newspapers tracked me down in the Caribbean to interview me about him, most of […]
Making the Mummies Cringe, Pt. III
The New York Sun says that a certain book called 740 Park was removed from the shelves of the Metropolitan Museum of Art bookstore when its author decided to write his next book about… the Met. Say it ain’t so, M. de Montebello!
Montebello-á-no-go
Though Philippe de Montebello, 71, has made his intention to remain in his job as director of the Metropolitan Museum abundantly clear (even boasting to author Danny Danziger that “I’m the institution to a level I’m not sure is healthy; the institution and I have totally merged”), the art world buzzes nonetheless with speculation about […]
Making the Mummies Cringe, Pt. II
Today’s New York Times reports that the Metropolitan Museum of Art bookstore may have banned a book, The Clarks of Cooperstown by Nicholas Fox Weber, about the notable and notably interesting art-collecting family. The article hints that the book ban resulted from its discussion of homosexuality in the Clark clan. Museum spokesman Harold Holzer, who […]
Party Hearty
My latest column for Contribute, the philanthropy magazine, is out this week. It’s about the big business of benefits. Check out a pdf here.