"What!" I exclaimed. "But you can't be Gatsby. He's dead!"

"I assure you," the stranger insisted, removing his false beard and mustache, "I'm alive." I had no choice but to believe him when he smiled reassuringly -- much more than reassuringly -- employing that rare inimitable smile of his,...

In Hollywood, "no" is silence over time. The way you find out you're not getting the job, that they passed, that they didn't respond to the material, that they're going a different direction, is silence. It's the call you don't get. No one wants to give you bad news, because...

I don't know what the agents told you, but this isn't a half-hour. I love half-hours, don't get me wrong, and people are doing great things. Especially (name show on network). Amazing. But what I really want to do is the kind of dark, edgy, noisy, sexy kind of long-form,...

Gas prices have just gone up for the 33rd day in a row. This would be terrible news for the recovery, but luckily in last week's State of the Union address, President Obama discovered the power to bend time with words, and used it to increase everyone's mileage.

In case...

You can't debate the NRA, and it's a waste of time to pick at their arguments, because they're not a political movement, or a marketing group or even a cult -- their worldview isn't robust enough to support a cult. Also, in a cult, someone in the leadership is usually...

I suppose Zero Dark Thirty is going to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and that's the last anyone will hear of it. (Unless they pick Lincoln. Or Silver Linings Playbook, although violent, crazy loners got considerably less loveable late last week.) Zero Dark Thirty is the best-reviewed American movie...

No one goes to Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood site anymore. They're so rudderless and fifth-rate it's not even good for laughs. You don't even have the heart to make fun of them. They've got nothing. They're like feral children guarding a skeleton in a sundress, or the rump elements of...

Over the weekend, a Chinese knock-off of a Russian fighter jet, the J-15, landed on China's used Ukrainian aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, for the first time. Luo Yuan, the senior engineer of China's aircraft carrier program, was there to witness this historic event and subsequently dropped dead. He...

There is a fort in the South were a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.
-- Reflections in a Golden Eye

We need more Petraeus scandal. It can't be over...

What are we going to tell our children when they ask about Mitt Romney? What was that all about? What was he doing in our lives? Who invited him to the party? Who thought he'd make a good president, or even a good candidate for president? It's like trying to...

Mitt Romney will stand in front of the handsome but useless old battleship Wisconsin this morning and name a running mate, probably handsome but useless Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan. Get it? They both have a connection to the word Wisconsin! It's like fate! Or that movie The Last of Sheila,...

Mitt Romney seems to have told a room full of donors in Jerusalem that they're culturally superior to Palestinians, and the evidence is that Palestinians are poor. This sounds kind of icky, but there are at least four reasons why it isn't as bad as you think:

1) Mitt Romney's...

Eighty-five years ago, on January 9, 1927, 78 children were killed in a movie theater in Montreal's east end, at a Sunday matinee double feature of a western called The Devil's Gulch and a comedy called Bring 'Em Young. A fire, started by faulty wiring, started a stampede. The people...

Miley Cyrus has a new tattoo, and it's deep.

You know how you learn a new word, and then you hear it twice the next week? (Or not. I've been waiting since 1985 for the next two times I hear "verdigris.") Last month, some of Jerry Sandusky's sniveling letters to...

No one except donors, advisors and other Romneys has heard the live sound of Mitt Romney's voice since last Thursday. There are no plans for him to speak, live, to anyone but donors, advisors and other Romneys until the middle of next week. I suppose you could call this a...

It's not fair to put Jerry Sandusky and Bristol Palin in the same sentence. One is a monster and the other is just a dope. But they have linked themselves with their favorite quote, which is weird. It's like if everyone in your yearbook's favorite expression was from "Free Bird."...

Something's been bugging me about Karen Klein, the school bus monitor from Greece, New York, who was taunted by children in a video on YouTube, and now seems to have been given half a million dollars by nice strangers who feel bad:

What happened to her never should...

Something really odd just happened. So I made a screen capture of it. Look:

What you've got on the left is a live track on the Facebook page for the USS Iowa, 881 feet long, displacing 41,000 tons, being towed majestically to...

"Facing the truth is hard to do, especially the truth about ourselves. So Americans have been sorely pressed to come to terms with the fact that after 9/11 our government began to torture people, and did so in defiance of domestic and international law. Most of us haven't come to...

"If people think there's something wrong with being successful in America, then they'd better vote for the other guy. Because I've been extraordinarily successful, and I want to use that success and that know-how to help the American people."
- Mitt Romney

"I stand ready to lead us...