Tiffany
Romney's Underappreciated Pen Pal
Newt Inc.'s New Paying Client: His Supporters
Teflon Newt?
Newt Gingrich Is an Author of Alternative Histories. What If He Wrote an Alternative History of Himself?
Before he was the frontrunner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich had gained acclaim as the author of a number of “alternate histories,” a genre of literature that speculates how important events in the past might have turned out differently. A high-brow genre this is not. One could say that “alternate history” is to “history” what “science-fiction” is to actual “science.” READ MORE >>
Newt On Tiffany's: "Girlfriends With Birthdays"
Making Waves
This American Lie
'The events described in these stories are real," humorist David Sedaris wrote in the introductory note to Naked, his 1997 collection of nonfiction essays. The New York Times was convinced: When Naked hit the best-seller list, it categorized the book as nonfiction. The Library of Congress called it biography, and Sedaris assured several interviewers over the years that the book was essentially factual. "Everything in Naked was true," he told the webzine Getting It in 1999. "I mean, I exaggerate. But all the situations were true." READ MORE >>
Why I Hate Christmas
When I was a kid in Minnesota my family had a huge Scandinavian feast every Christmas Eve, complete with two dozen relatives, three feet of snow, a mountainous evergreen trimmed to the top, a six-course dinner with lutefisk and turkey and eight or ten pies, long-winded after-dinner stories about baseball and World War II, and, of course, lots of brightly wrapped presents. It has taken me three decades of rigorous economics training and life on the East Coast to shake off the warm nostalgia of those holidays. READ MORE >>
