Charlie Carillo

I'm on an "A" train rumbling deep into Brooklyn when suddenly a young guy gets on board with a pit bull on a chain.

Not a leash -- a metal chain, with links big enough to support the anchor to the Intrepid.

The good news is, the dog is...

You can't work in the media these days without using the word "miracle" at least once a week, with gusts up to five times per week during holiday seasons.

I've always hated that word, but there's no other word for the story I'm about to tell, so buckle up...

My bumpy career as a writer leads me to the conclusion that three "L" words make life worth living:

Linguine, literature and laughter.

In this video you'll see how to make a good cheap red sauce for linguine, while hearing crazy stories about literature -- specifically my five novels,...

My good buddy Mike was hunched over his drink at a downtown bar, looking as if he'd just gotten bad news from an X-ray. It was actually even worse than that.

His first marriage had flat-lined and his second marriage was in extremely critical condition, so he was softening...

The man convicted for the crime that inspired the most famous headline in the history of tabloid journalism recently sought parole nearly 29 years after it happened, which put that headline right back in the headlines:

HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR

I was in the New York Post...

We tease my father because he wears a Harvard University sweatshirt when he does yard work. My mother found it at a thrift shop. It's tattered at the cuffs and the lettering is faded.

He wears it with pride. Yard work is yard work, and in a bizarre way it's...

It was Christmas Eve, and to mark the anniversary of this sacred night before our savior's birth I was upstairs with my father, helping him do a touch-up paint job on the bedroom walls.

My mother was at church, doing penance for her sins. My father and I were...

John Lennon had just been murdered, and the city was going wild because the New York Post ran a shocking front-page photo of his body in the morgue.

I know the town was going wild because I was working the phones at the Post city desk in December of 1980,...

Every Thanksgiving the president of the United States "pardons" a turkey, allowing the lucky bird to dodge its fate on a dinner plate. It's a dull ceremony and they repeat the performance year after year, president after president.

No suspense. Nothing to tingle the spine.

It just can't...

As publicity stunts go, the Kim Kardashian divorce is downright unimaginative and obvious. One of the greatest publicity stunts that never happened was cooked up at the New York Post, and it shames me to admit it was my fault it failed.

Ready for this? The Dalai Lama was coming...

I walk into my parents' house with my wife for Sunday lunch and immediately sense that we're in the middle of A Situation, a suspicion my mother wastes no time confirming. She's all worked up, and here it comes.

"Remember that woman your father was dating right before he started...

The three worst experiences for me are attending funerals, buying clothes and getting haircuts, usually in that order.

But there are times I'd actually rather attend a funeral than sit in a barber's chair, depending on who dies.

I never get a good haircut, and it's not the fault...

Just who are all those loud, irritating "talking heads" you see and hear giving soundbites on celebrity news shows? Here's a question-and-answer guide to set you straight!

Q: Celebrity stories are always filled with soundbites from "insiders." What exactly is an insider?

A: An "insider" is usually a person whose...

This political love-fest between New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and all these people begging him to run for president is going to end abruptly when the big guy realizes something that others have realized before him.

That thing is this -- no American of Italian descent is ever going to...

Sometimes the great tabloid gods drop one right in your lap, and that's what happened the day Hercules came into my life.

Not the Greek god from Mount Olympus -- the Greek Greenwich Village grocer who found fame and fortune one fine day in 1986.

Well, not exactly "fortune,"...

LONDON - Nobody says anything, and nobody has to. We all know that it's a dubious day to be riding on a plane. We line up for the security check at Heathrow Airport on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 as if it's any other day, which it certainly isn't.

The...

LONDON - Never mind why, but the other day I was sitting in the waiting room of a medical clinic in an English suburb when I witnessed one of the the most extraordinary things I've ever seen.

Always happens when you don't expect it, doesn't it?

British clinics aren't much...

If you've been anywhere near a TV set or a radio over the past few days you're certain to have heard two words at least a hundred times: "Mother Nature."

That's because Mother Nature took it on the chin for this past weekend's hurricane (or hurricane-ette, as it turned out...

An all-day rain in the city of New York makes you think about sad stuff, the things you should have done, the things you shouldn't have done, the things you'll probably never get around to doing.

It gets worse by the hour. On a day like this I sit at...

One of the worst things about technology is the way it's taking the poetry out of the newspaper game. We're all appalled to learn that a computer geek can hit a few buttons and hack into someone's private telephone information. That's a terrible thing to do for many reasons, and...