I saw the first episode of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s take on the so-called inner workings of television news and in the very first scene I got the message. The anchor Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, excoriates a young female student who asks the question: Why are we the greatest nation in the world?
Read more: The Newsroom, The Show
Up front let me say that my relationship with the Watergate scandal, which happened forty years ago and brought down Richard Nixon has always been peripheral; my role, merely, the typical fly on the wall observations of a novelist in search of a story to tell.
Read more: My Watergate
I have been baffled for the last few years by audiences rising up like ecstatic robots to give a standing ovation to every Broadway show I have recently attended, no matter how puerile, how badly performed or conceived, no matter how mediocre, as if they have just experienced a high point in national culture.
Read more: The Knee-Jerk Standing Ovation
It may be time for the media that covers the book business to stop publishing best seller lists. They are, in today’s book choosing environment, disorienting, unhelpful and confusing, a valiant but failed attempt to make sense out of disorder.
Read more: Are Best-seller Lists Irrelevant?
The success of the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel may yet prove to be the watershed moment when the movie industry gets the message that ignoring people over 60 is a profound marketing mistake, not only for the film business but for “everything.”
Read more: The Greying of America
