Leslie Savan wrote a column about advertising and commercial culture for The Village Voice for 13 years, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1997, 1992, and 1991. Many of those columns appear in her collection, THE SPONSORED LIFE: Ads, TV, and American Culture (Temple University Press). In her latest book, SLAM DUNKS AND NO-BRAINERS: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever (Knopf), Savan looks at the power of pop talk, at how everyday language is commercialized and, as in the case of George ("It's a slam dunk!") Tenet, weaponized. Savan has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, New York, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Blueprint, and Salon. She has appeared frequently on TV and radio, and is currently a talking head in Helvetica, a documentary film about the typeface.

Blog Entries by Leslie Savan

Could Edwards Beat McCain? The Polls Won't Tell Us

Posted January 26, 2008 | 10:26 AM (EST)


Yesterday's Zogby poll has Edwards within Iowa-like striking distance of Hillary for second place in today's South Carolina primary. "The real movement here is by John Edwards, who is the only one who continues to gain ground in our three-day tracking poll," writes John Zogby, attributing most of the...

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Slam Dunk

Posted May 4, 2007 | 10:44 AM (EST)


It doesn't matter whether George Tenet's Oval Office slam dunk meant that we'd definitely find WMD or, as he insists, that he could definitely make a stronger case that we'd find WMD than the booor-ing presentation his deputy had just made. "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk!" meant both, and...

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A Snowball's Chance in Hummer

Posted March 22, 2007 | 02:08 PM (EST)


In their coyly comedic way, ads for Hummer's H3 have often tried to present the vehicle as a hybrid, if you will, of life's great opposing forces: male/female, war/peace, even rightwing/leftwing. Last year, for instance, a nice, tofu-buying guy at the grocery checkout is so humiliated at the sight of...

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