I had abandoned my plans to buy Sarah Palin's autobiography. You know how it is -- you hear about what is likely to be a great book and you get all ready to read it, but you don't quite pay attention to what day it's going to come out, and...

Recently I was given just 24 hours to explore a first production build of the Apple iTablet -- and here are my first impressions and discoveries. First, it's more like an iPhone than a MacBook. The operating system depends on gestures, and expands the vocabulary. Your hand is going to...

If we bought the New York Times every day to find out which of our local supermarkets had the best deals on fresh crab, which happens to be in season at the moment, I wouldn't be complaining about the quality of the news reporting that appears in the paper from...

Our favorite Italian restaurant recently sent us a note with the news that truffle season was upon us once again and we might consider coming in for a few grams of the freshly shaved fungi on our pasta, for a princely supplemental increment of $60 a garnish. Seems reasonable, in...

Why can't little Tiffany learn to program? What happened to the American genius for math? I've been wondering about this for a long time, but suddenly I saw the cause during the World Series last night.

Imagine a computer that runs on chewing tobacco. Shouldn't be that hard -- just...

I needed to look up a quote in Hamlet the other day, and took down a volume from my library to search for it. This particular Shakespeare set, limited to 1000 copies and bound in green linen, was purchased by my grandfather in 1910, just five years after he landed...

Turns out that running a political campaign on a vague, all-inclusive slogan like "Hope" can be a dangerous game. For the idealistic among us, Obama's call for us to unleash our hope meant unleashing that latent desire for a new kind of politics. For the needy, hope could mean emergency...

The broadcasting world was rocked this morning when News Corporation and Viacom announced that Fox News would be sold to Viacom in a deal said to approach $5 billion in both cash and stock. Reached in London, Rupert Murdoch said that Fox News was on a trajectory that was in...

If you read the N.Y.Times in its coverage of the disruption of the Kindle, you might think that publishers are losing a fortune from the sudden rise in Kindle sales.

Actually, the opposite is true. Amazon is buying Kindle rights from publishers at the same price they're paying for physical...

Search and advertising giant Google and Ohio Art, maker of the children's classic drawing toy announced a joint venture today to produce the first e-book reader for pre-schoolers. Named the Etch a Book, the new reader will capitalize on the highly refined Etch a...

When my youngest, Max, was 8, he could run off a string of complicated jokes like an old pro in the Catskills. Really, he could have become a regular on the Tonight Show. That good.

We loved to talk about what was funny. I asked him what a really, really...

This week in the "Have You No Shame" department, I need to follow up on the N.Y. Time's proclivity to heap multiple reviews on pet books while giving zero coverage to thousands of other worthies. This would not be a serious issue if the Times was giving the nation a...

Calling in those McKinsey folks to review your profit and loss numbers in the middle of the deepest recession since the 1930s is a little like having Dr. Kevorkian over to offer a second opinion.

"No, really, I'm feeling fine. Just a little touch of the flu."

"Not at your...

My heartfelt condolences to Ruth Reichl and all the other employees and freelancers who made Gourmet Magazine the most-waited for package in our mailbox every month. We have been subscribers, with occasional time off, since the 60s, when few of us would venture to actually cook any of the insanely...

I was surprised and saddened to see in the Times this A.M. that Kate Duffy had died.

I had put my toe in publishing waters by agreeing to become Ron Busch's West Coast scout for his new publishing venture, Tudor Publishing, a new mass-market paperback house. One day, out of...

When I was involved with ...And Ladies of the Club a few eons ago I received an offer for the audio rights for the book. This was to be a condensed version, since the book was more than 1000 pages long. I asked for a...

My mother was a live book reviewer in Cleveland, an activity that seems to have gone the way of the traveling magic lantern lecture tent show. Fortunately for Mom, the traffic lights in our community were exceedingly slow, and she always had a book by her side. We joked that...

Oh to sing the joys of Sunday morning with the NY Times Book Review section, where we can discover which books are going to get their second Times review. This morning the winner was E.L. Doctorow's novelistic treatment of the hoarding Collyer brothers, a story apparently of immense import to...

You're third in line for takeoff, finally ready to depart for La Guardia and get to your lunch meeting in Chicago. The pilot comes on the P.A. for a last-minute cheery message: "Thanks for your patience. We hope to make it up once we're in the air and get you...

In the golden days of radio the great symphony orchestras of the world broadcast over short and long wave bands, creating pockets of listeners all over the globe. In isolated Japan in the 1940s the young composer Toru Takemitsu learned the ways of Western music from the Armed Forces radio...