As I got ready to exit my office at Editor & Publisher, perhaps for the last time, this afternoon, I found myself trying to ignore this sad end to the decade by focusing on some wild and crazy stories that I've covered here this past year. Here's just a sample:

At 2 p.m. today we ship the possibly final issue of Editor & Publisher from our office here at Astor Place in NYC. For the record, it is the January 2010 issue, so we made it into our 126th year, at least.

As many may know, we got our...

Well, I've had better Christmases -- thanks to learning a few days ago that my magazine, Editor & Publisher, faces a January 1 expiration notice after publishing for only 125 years. So, to cheer myself up, I launched earlier this week the trailer for my upcoming (and first)...

My monthly posts here on the world of Web series have proven quite popular so I'm back with another edition in a year-end look around.

In the past, I've probed the growing popularity of Web comedy and dramatic series, suggesting they were a growing threat, down the road a...

No matter how you feel about the pro-choice/anti-choice issue, it's always been difficult to examine data on the number of legal abortions in the U.S. on a state-by-state level. Recently The Guardian newspaper's DataBlog performed a real service in pulling together the latest numbers (from 2005) on the number...

That's what one Web site suggested, in a list of "famous people" who had a very bad year in 2009. I came in at #18, putting me behind Tiger, Madoff and Carrie Prejean but ahead of Mark Sanford (who may be impeached) and Michael Jackson -- who died!...

When I met Bruce Springsteen on this very date back in 1972, I could not have imagined that the scrawny kid in the hooded sweatshirt from New Jersey, whose first "record" (as we used to call them) had not yet come out, would one day play the Super Bowl, let...

It's gotten remarkably little coverage so far -- perhaps because there's no "terrorist" angle -- but we're now catching up with the case of an Iraq war vet now captured and suspected of killing two of his fellow servicemen, age 20 and 23, near the army base at Fort...

In the aftermath of President Obama's important speech on the U.S. escalation in Afghanistan, I would like to update John Kerry's famous question in 1971: "How do you ask someone to be the last American soldier to die for a mistake?"

This has caused me to wonder: Well, who was...

No matter how you feel about the pro-choice/anti-choice issue, it's always been difficult to examine data on the number of legal abortions in the U.S. on a state-by-state level. Now The Guardian newspaper's DataBlog has performed a real service in pulling together the latest numbers (from 2005) on the...

To give us some perspective on this day: Beethoven in 1825, very late in his life, wrote the third movement, molto adagio, of his string quartet opus 132, offering thanks for being alive, despite having gone completely deaf, the worst possible fate for a composer and musician.

Music lovers around...

Forty-four years ago this week, I attended my first rock concert. Many others naturally followed, from Blind Faith to Springsteen, Elvis Costello, U2, Lucinda Williams, and the Swell Season, along with about eight years as the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. But that first concert remains vivid, and historic,...

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that 52% of all Republicans believe that the group ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, with another 21% saying they are not sure. And 35% of all those in the survey over the age of 65, from both parties, agreed...

It was amusing -- if appalling -- to watch David Brooks on the TV yesterday declare that Sarah Palin is a "joke" and only qualified to be a TV "talk show host." Last year, during the 2008 campaign, he believed exactly the same thing but refused to put it in...

With the publication of an interview with Sgt. Mark Todd, the actual cop who gunned down the killer at Fort Hood -- following its account of an unnamed eyewitness last night -- the New York Times finally underlined what some of us noticed from nearly the start:...

Early this week, President Obama -- perhaps under new pressure as a Nobel Peace Prize winner -- said he would like to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki during his presidency. If he does, he will become the first sitting U.S. president to make that trip.

Yesterday, Veterans Day arrived, so...

It's nothing new for aggrieved authors to write letters to the highly influential New York Times Book Review, protesting a negative review, or one rife with errors. Sometimes the protest relates to the unfair choice of reviewer. What's unusual about Mark Danner's letter to the Times concerning the Oct. 18...

Yes, Barack Obama ended up beating John McCain rather easily one year ago, but Stephen Colbert didn't stay in the race for the White House or Obama could have really been in trouble (for a minute or two, anyway). So on this anniversary day, allow me to recall Colbert's tentative...

Like everyone who covered extensively the CIA leak case, Judy Miller and the Scooter Libby trial, I am anxiously awaiting, with appropriate skepticism, the pending release of the first Hollywood treatment, which has the wonderful title, if you remember the scandal, Fair Game.

Casting seems swell: Naomi Watts as...

Last month, I posted here for the first time on the growing popularity of Web comedy and dramatic series, suggesting they were a growing threat, down the road a bit, to network TV series. This was inspired by noting that The New York Times had just featured for the...