Matt Dorf of Rabinowitz/Dorf communications informs me I got the #s wrong on how many young Jews go to Israel free every year. Your piece on Ali Abunimah’s talk includes a mention of our client birthright israel: “Indeed, he said,…
Having spent months in Tonga, I’m not entirely surprised by the latest videos of Nuku’alofa in flames. It’s a sleepy South Pacific capital, and there’s always a lot of feeling rumbling underneath the placidity. My main Tonga interest is the…
Ten days before he died, I met Robert Altman at a party in New York for his friend Gore Vidal’s new book. I was on a couch and he was in an armchair when a friend started telling him how…
Those of us who love a tiny Polynesian nation in the South Pacific are distressed by the reports out of Tonga of anti-royalist riots that have left at least six dead and destroyed the downtown of Nuku’alofa, the capital of…
This morning I overheard my wife giving relationship advice to a friend on the phone: “This is the rule. In the beginning of a relationship, those first two or three golden weeks, you can confess anything. You get permission to…
Janet Malcolm is one of my idols, I’d read her shopping lists if someone would print them. Her book The Journalist and the Murderer is a cultural landmark, it changed the relationship of journalists and their sources, giving more power…
Some readers are abusing this site by leaving comments “signed” by Phil Weiss. I didn’t write these comments, I’m going to start taking them down when I get a minute; they’re misrepresentations. If you want to go after me, fine,…
My commenters below are right: the prejudices that Sacha Baron Cohen stokes in Borat are conventional ones, and the film is a form of Red-State blackface. All the juice in his journey happens between the coasts. When he’s on the…
As I went downtown to see the play “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” last night, I read the Forward’s coverage of Jimmy Carter’s much-awaited book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Forthcoming from Simon & God bless them Schuster.. The article said…