Here is the great lesson of the newly unsealed Jacqueline Kennedy oral history tapes: Jackie said some snarky things. And her biting, often witty remarks have actually burnished and freshened up her image. Doesn't it make her seem more real, likable, shrewd and contemporary to have called Indira Gandhi "a...

When a murder victim is tossed onto a baseball diamond during a friendly Boston Police Dept. game, BFF's detective Jane Rizzoli and coroner Maura Isles go running. Not odd for a body to fall in front of them -- they are in a crime drama. But an unexpectedly witty twist...

Thank goodness I'm not a Huston. I was entranced by Love Child, Allegra Huston's irresistible memoir about life with her genius Dad -- John Huston, director of masterpieces from The Maltese Falcon to The Man Who Would Be King -- and adored big sister, Anjelica. But even if you've always...

Early in Confessions of a Shopaholic, Isla Fisher gazes into a store window at a glistening, diaphanous, emerald-green scarf, (the ultra-long kind that did Isadora Duncan in) and knows that if she buys it, it will change her life. We know that if she reaches for her credit card it...

Whew! Now we don't have to assume that every word coming out of the White House is a lie. But even in our new Obama age, human nature hasn't changed; every day we are surrounded by lying, cheating, manipulative foes and friends (kind-hearted white lies count). A smart way to...

I like Hugh Jackman, really. Enough to forgive him Australia. But this year's Oscar host seems to be heading in a disastrous retro direction, even as he and the show's new producers promise to revamp that dead-weight ratings loser.

The producers, Laurence Mark and Bill...

Once in our political history, wordiness was next to godliness. Really. As Sarah Vowell reminds us in The Wordy Shipmates, her wry, unlikely bestseller -- unless you think the world was hungry for a witty book about New England's 17th century Puritans -- one of many differences between the...

Sometimes a political documentary plays like a horror movie, and Return of the War Room scared me more than anything I've seen in a while -- (not Palin-could-be-president fear level, but scary). Fifteen years after Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker 's documentary The War Room took us inside Bill Clinton's...