Hans Eisenbeis By now you have heard about the flap over at The New York Press, where editor Jeff Koyen walked the plank for a tasteless feature called “The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope.” The general consensus seems to be that his main transgression was publishing a spectacularly unfunny piece by a … Read more
We happened to be sharing a table with Star Tribune critic Chris Riemenshneider over the weekend—although we prefer to stay incognito, the better to avoid a punch on the nose for previous infractions and faux pas. Where were we? In the choked air of the Fine Line Music Cafe, after receiving a pair of press … Read more
Time Out Chicago has finally launched, to lukewarm response from at least one critic. It’s hard to imagine anyone in Chicago getting exercised about a new magazine or newspaper. The city has been so awash with new pubs in the past five years, readers are probably asking themselves what more there is to say about … Read more
So, it is day two of what amounts to a four-day Rosh Hoshanna for Minnesotans; it is the state high school hockey tournament. As threatened, we have set up the office television, stretched the bunny ears across the bookshelf, fiddled with the horizontal and the vertical. We only saw a little of yesterday’s game between … Read more
A little over a year ago, Paul Gruchow killed himself—and we are still feeling robbed. At the time, we put pen to paper and tried to memorialize him as best we could. We still believe that he was one of the finest environmental essayists ever, anywhere. Just today, we finally got around to reading Michael … Read more
I assume the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated is out, although I have neither seen it nor gone looking for it, have never done so that I recall—though I certainly do not mind it when it passes into my life, say in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube. One of our prized possessions here in … Read more
It’s new-issue Monday, and there is nothing as exciting or scary as setting your work of the previous month before a jury of 65,000 peers. We tend to get feedback of three kinds. First, there are complimentary emails from readers who like what they read, and these are the ones we read repeatedly, we print … Read more
We may have gotten a little carried away yesterday, a little intemperate. After all, we love Frank Rich. His far-ranging free association is often a delight to read (but like his neo-con complement, David Brooks, his conclusions are sometimes a little thin). Rich was merely the cart onto which we loaded our rotten apples—it’s nothing … Read more
The Koufax awards were announced today, and you will be forgiven for having no idea what they are. They are the blogging world’s equivalent of the Oscars or the Grammys. And now it can be admitted that there is an award for every channel of human industry ever conceived and exercised. Can there be any … Read more
For some reason our attempt to point you to Steve Gilliard’s compelling thoughts on “New Journalism” failed yesterday, so we’ll try again. I am envious of Gilliard’s broad-ranging feel for the middle-distance history of journalism—particularly as it was affected by the convulsions of the sixties and seventies. How could such intense social and political upheaval … Read more