Originally published May 8, 1984
“To the ruling class, Larry Davis is society's nightmare, a horror-film monster who keeps coming back every time you think you’ve put him away for good. But to the powerless, Davis is a resistance fighter ... ”
Originally published February 21, 2020
Until he started shooting himself in the foot with great regularity, Giuliani benefited from an elegiac media reception of a kind not seen in this town since the salad days of Thomas E. Dewey
September 6, 2020
“In America, poetic truths have real-life consequences, and Mailer is one of the few American intellectuals to perceive this fact as both fundamental and fundamentally good”
September 4, 2020
“Despite his penetration of the national psyche, and his status as more or less the George Washington of American letters, the respect Cooper has received at home has rarely been more than grudging”
September 4, 2020
“The truth of a time and place is, of course, always illusive; but no historian can tell the story of Miami in the last decade without acknowledging one gigantic fact of municipal life: cocaine.”
September 3, 2020
“Most vampire tales I’ve read lately read like little Kinsey reports, full of tasty trivia about vampire life, a subject that used to be shrouded in mystery and fear, like sex. Are you ready to open the forbidden curtain?”
September 2, 2020
"Since October 1985, rock has been attacked from city halls, statehouses, fundamentalist pulpits, and the executive echelons of the FBI."
September 2, 2020
The fundamental question about the Koch administration is no longer why the mayor gave power to so many crooks, but exactly what happened years ago when whistleblowers, law enforcement investigators, and private citizens first tried to warn him
August 31, 2020
“My mother is an urban peasant and I am my mother’s daughter. The city is our natural element. We each have daily adventures with bus drivers, bag ladies, ticket takers, and street crazies. Walking brings out the best in us.”
August 28, 2020