Shame on You, Mr. Fineman
A one-act musical written after discovering that Howard Fineman, Newsweek's Chief Political Correspondent, Senior Editor, and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief, had shamelessly stolen from my Unfit story from Sept. 28, "UNFIT for an Uncomplicated Strategy" (in which I postulate that Barack...

Once not so long ago, it was understood among those who thought about such things that writing was a dying art form, a relic from an era when things like time, opportunity, and audiences were available and things like authority, expertise, and artistry mattered. Scholars and critics and other old...

I remember reading an interview with Kevin Smith back in 1997 in which the trench-coat-wearing writer/director/Miramax poster boy admitted that his third film, Chasing Amy, which was getting a lot of positive critical attention at the time, was actually intended to be his second. Figuring there was bound to be...

You know something is upside-down in the world when conservatives are marching on Washington.

I mean, say what you will about the birthers, the nativists, the death panelers, the 9-12ers, and the John Birch Tea-Party guys; conservatives are not by nature a marching people -- the cardiovascular side of their...

Anyone involved in journalism or interested in journalism or interested in anyone who's involved or interested in journalism knows that journalism is in the midst of an existential crisis equal in size and severity to the one Hollywood went through when it discovered sound and silent-movie titans like Buster Keaton...

My father died in December 2006. My only consolation is that it didn't happen two months earlier.

Because by early November of that year, the Democrats had regained control of Congress, ending their six-year wandering in the wilderness and the country's six-year descent into madness and my Dad's six-year winter...

TV: And now we're going to send you out to Austin, Texas, where Chuck Lovell is with veteran swingman and fan-favorite Josh Rosenblatt, who outdid himself today at the Hancock Park basketball court off Red River near the shopping center where Old Navy used to be. Chuck?

Chuck: Thanks, you.

Right this way, ladies and gentleman. Squeeze on in, if you would, so everyone can get a look. I know it's snug in here, but it was a different time back then, smaller people, smaller doorways. Ha ha. Right, ma'am, as I said already, no cameras please. Flash photography could...

One day when I was 12 years old, word got around school that a copy of Hustler magazine had been spotted in the woods behind the soccer field. Thirty seconds after the final bell rang, dozens of my male classmates and I were back in those woods scouring the ground...

Wednesday:

1:05pm -- Wake up. Log on to the Internet. 15,000 thousand people died in an earthquake in South East Asia yesterday; 600,000 Americans lost their jobs this month; not a single new message in my inbox. The world is a cruel and unforgiving place.

2pm -- Start my movie...

To Our Stockholders:

2009 has proven to be a harder year than we, the Board of Directors of Josh Rosenblatt Enterprises, anticipated. The financial model governing the economy of the United States for the last 233 years -- that goods and services can be purchased using money and that money...