When we last were blessed with a John le Carré novel, we were confronted with a question not often posed in espionage thrillers -- who is more immoral, the biggest money-launderer in Russia or a London banker? (Maybe the title will give you a clue: Our Kind of Traitor.)

Now...

The Great Gatsby is days away from public unveiling, but there's such a media storm around it I feel like I've already seen it.

So I'm turning my attention to the anti-Gatsby.

Which turns out also to have been written by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Last Tycoon was Fitzgerald's last...

The budget was $105 million, and as the May 10 opening of Baz Lurhmann's 3D adaptation of The Great Gatsby approaches, it feels like another $105 million is being spent to promote it. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel sold few copies in 1925; now The Great Gatsby tops the Amazon bestseller...

Christmas comes early this year. And if you are good girls and boys, you will now do whatever you must to get your hands on a great present: "Nomad," 40 minutes of music by an African guitarist who's called Bombino.

This is protein-rich music: great for parties (you will come...

The head of a New York-based arts organization recently asked me to suggest a musician who might perform a few songs at its annual benefit.

I recommended Steve Earle.

For several reasons. He has a new CD. He's a mesmerizing, charismatic presence. And in live performance -- let's just say...

"A major literary event."

That's the phrase for any novel by James Salter, and especially "All That Is." First, because Salter is known in the trade as a "writer's writer" --- under-appreciated by the public but revered by those in the know. Then, because this is his first full-length novel...

When I first met Tift Merritt, I thought she was the girl next door.

I said as much: "You seem like such a... oh... little sister... a nice kid. Can you rip it up?"

She took my head off: "Hey, I don't do this job because I'm shitty at it."

The sickest she'd ever been was "after I ate a bad chicken sandwich in South America."

And now her left hand doesn't work.

Susan Spencer-Wendel lives in reality -- she's a veteran journalist for the Palm Beach Post.

It doesn't take her long to figure out she has amyotrophic lateral...

I met Edward Jay Epstein in 1965, a lifetime ago. He was researching a book about the Kennedy assassination. I wondered why. Wasn't JFK killed by Lee Harvey Oswald? As I say: a lifetime ago.

As a reporter and researcher, Ed Epstein gives new meaning to "meticulous." He is a...

I love silent days crafting sentences alone, but if you put a gun to my head and told me I'd have to trade my maid's room for the stages of music clubs and universal critical praise and the adulation of America's smartest audiences.....yeah, I guess I could stand being Josh...

Judy Resnick and I seem so different --- I'm New York writer to the bone, she's West Coast finance on the surface --- that people often ask how we became friends.

"Through Mike Milken," I say, knowing that the mere mention of the financier and philanthropist will only lead to...

No, Chile's first-ever nominee for Best Foreign film, was never going to be playing in the sixplex next to Die Hard: The Reunion Tour. But when it didn't win the Academy Award, there went the possibility that Americans will even know it exists.

Let's correct that here.

In 1973,...

The nominees for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture are:

Alan Arkin, Argo
Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
Christopher Waltz, Django Unchained

On February 24, the Academy Award should go to....

... Christopher Walken, A...

In 200 words, complete this thought: "If Martin Luther King Jr. came back to life and saw the United States today, he'd ....."

My response would be along these lines: "... be assassinated within a year."

But we have a black President! Yes, we do. We also have a gun...

Carmen M. Ortiz
United States Attorney
District of Massachusetts
1 Courthouse Way, Suite 9200
Boston, Ma. 02210

Dear Ms. Ortiz,

The suicide of 26-year-old Aaron Swartz has inspired an outpouring of commentary of the Web, much...

Almost exactly a year ago --- in the first HeadButler.com edition of 2012 --- I wrote about Blake Mills, a California musician you never heard of. But you would, I said, because "without any hype, with no great charisma, without even much in the way of stage presence,...

UPDATE: After writing this, I saw ZERO DARK THIRTY. (I didn't pay. The studio sent me a DVD.) The torture scenes are, I think, deliberately ambiguous. Not for artistic reasons, I suspect, but for business reasons. That is, there are two American audiences for the film. One is red state,...

As someone who flunked shop and almost had to repeat the ninth grade, I have extravagant respect for anyone who can make things. Real things. In the physical world.

I'm not going out on a limb in my fondness for the work of Frances Palmer, a potter from Weston, Connecticut....

Writers don't retire.

But Philip Roth is doing just that. At 79, he's decided he's "finished" with fiction: He told The New Yorker, "I don't want to read it, I don't want to write it, and I don't even want to talk about it anymore. I dedicated my...

This election was a reality TV event, from the loopy Republican primary to the media's who's-up-who's-down obsession with polls. "Facts" were distressingly fungible. Debates were reviewed like drama.

But one video cut through all of that. It showed Mitt Romney speaking at a hedge fund manager's Boca Raton fundraiser to...