My version of Proverbs 30:18"19 goes: There are three things that I do not understand: the success of Al Jolson, the popularity of Milton Berle, and the appeal of Archie Comics. I may loathe a particular pop culture product, but I normally can understand why someone else might find it ...
So there's a frickin" rape quilt now. Remember the AIDS quilt? Back in the 1980s, gays swiped another quaint, wholesome, colorful thing (rainbows, anyone?) to trick us into thinking everybody could get AIDS, and not just stubbornly promiscuous male homosexuals (with heroin addicts who were ...
"Perhaps it all goes to show that the middlebrow is inherently corrupt." That's a particularly sweeping statement of smug class-conscious snobbery, even by Guardian standards. Guardian blogger Jonathan Jones feels vindicated. He alone once had the courage to call the inexplicably ...
"This is just like a Hollywood awards show, but with fewer Jews." You"d be forgiven for assuming that's another excerpt from actor Gary Oldman's forthcoming Playboy magazine interview, since we"ve been hearing about the damn thing all week. The hundreds of articles, Tweets, and ...
Roughly half of the emails I get from my blog readers ask, "Where do you get this stuff?" while the other half contain "this stuff": links to crazy stories and freaky photos with "Thought of you" in the subject line. Take this extremely disturbing photo of two gentlemen ...
Blogger Kate McMillan quips that "prostitution is to "sex work" what cigarette smoking is to "lung exercise."" "Progressives" don"t just redefine (and valorize) deviancy; they insist on renaming it, too. We all hate this, and mock it. We"re always right. But ...
Scientific advances spur social mutations as surely as ergo prompters hoc. Sometimes the connection is irrefutable, however, if slightly askew. Air conditioning, for example, killed the Catskills. Why decamp to the mountains upstate to escape those sweltering New York City summers when you could ...
"I stand to win a great deal of money in a game show that will never be invented," Dick Cavett said somewhere, reflecting on his rare and unprofitable ability to ad-lib rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. I, on the other hand, am one of those bores without number who's convinced I could ...
Within my lifetime, The New York Times will close its doors for good. "It's not even a newspaper anymore," Dennis Miller likes to say. "It's just a building acrobats climb." So adding to the thousands of words already written about the dismissal of its first female executive editor ...
In 1997, my second book came out. It was a collection of columns I"d written for a Catholic newspaper, so Vatican Radio requested an interview. Before we went on the air, the host asked me to count to three before answering each of his questions. He needed those few seconds to reach across the ...
