I've been full-body scanned--and it was pretty disturbing.

This was at the beginning of the Iraq War. Every journalist trying to get into the daily briefings at CENTCOM headquarters in Doha had to go through the machine. This went on every day for weeks so a certain affability built up...

Let's try to do this reasonably and with particularity: Every call I made yesterday on my iPhone dropped. A number of them were to my 84-year-old mother who has a hard time understanding why telephones no longer work.

I have a hard time understanding this, too.

Is it...

Here's the puzzle: Does imminent passage of a health care bill, however sorely flawed, mean the president is a failure or a success?

Ross Douthat, the former right-wing-ish blogger who, in an unlikely bit of casting, the New York Times elevated to its op-ed page this year, and who...

It certainly feels like we dodged another bullet, Rudy deciding not to run for governor or for senator.

But it seems suspicious, too. Why would he huff and puff about his designs, first on the governor's race and then on the Senate seat, and then, with a whimper,...

I want to draw my personal line at Brittany Murphy. It's a death without worthy pathos. It does not even invite much morbid curiosity. A most minor starlet, already past her prime, dies in an utterly conventional way--methodical, long-term, self-abuse. And yet, nearly as a Christmas miracle, she's reborn...

What is in the health care bill? The Senate version? The House version?

I have been looking through the coverage--the vast sturm und drang about it--and can't find any news organization that has in any accessible way summarized the damn thing and made it easy reading.

In essence,...

Among the worst things you can do in upper-middle-class, politically-correct, don't-call-attention-to-yourself culture is insult a service person. This is counter-intuitive because one of the things that is most often done in upper-middle-class culture is complain about service.

Sen. Chuck Schumer is in hot water because he seems to have...

Some people have all the luck.

Or, some people, familiar with adversity and reversals of fortune, know merely to wait until someone else hands you a trump card.

Silvio Berlusconi, struck rudely and brutally in the face with a souvenir statue, is turning the tables on his critics. All...

There is a more and more insistent question being asked by right-thinking people about why we dwell so obsessively on the domestic problems of celebrities. It's an issue we debate all the time at Newser, where we dwell with quite some verve on these matters: How much is too much?...

Jason Calacanis, one of the longest-lasting web entrepreneurs, has made an interesting proposal to Newser, among others. He wants Newser, or the New York Times, or the Huffington Post, or Gawker, or the Wall Street Journal to buy one of his blog posts for $1,000--or actually, for the rights to...

The president accepted his Peace Prize by arguing for war.

It had really seemed like he would need to thread a needle in Oslo, having to graciously to accept an award for bringing peace to the world while he primes a battlefield. He had to mollify or triangulate his...

If you are the manager of a Wall Street firm, or one of its communications advisers, what you are thinking about right now is this: How do we spin the bonuses?

The 2009 bonus numbers, which will shortly begin to leak out, are, for the banks, a problem perhaps...

Here is the dumbest newspaper article I've read in quite a long time. I mean dumb not just in the sense of failing to understand what most everyone else surely understands, or of taking a rolling-on-the-floor obvious point and considering it to be an original one, but of being...

Not too long ago, Amanda Knox, convicted the other day in Italy of murdering her junior-year-abroad roommate, Meredith Kercher, was "Foxy Knoxy." Now she is martyred Amanda, a tabloid Joan of Arc, an immensely sympathetic character at the center of a monstrous international miscarriage of justice.

Because...

My friend Ian Katz, a senior editorial figure at the Guardian newspaper in London, and a prime mover of an initiative to create one editorial on climate change that a coalition of newspapers around the world publishes today, writes to ask my opinion of "why no major US newspapers...

It is good for the media business that Tiger Woods has, apparently, never read a tabloid newspaper or watched a tabloid show. Nobody may have ever been so unsavvy as Tiger.

The Tiger image--uncomplicated, unspoiled, unworldly, utterly game-focused, which is now seemingly being debunked by events and by the...

The Times business section leads with one of those stories that have been so often written about great media mergers: How did it happen, who whispered what to whom, who knew what when about the deal? In the past, these stories were breathless if not orgiastic. This one, about

It is neither unreasonable nor dishonorable to be as cynical as possible when evaluating the official rationale for going to war--or continuing one.

President Obama, plausibly, believes very little of what he said last night about why we should continue to be in Afghanistan--that we could successful prosecute it,...

There is a club in the West 40s in Manhattan which includes among its members many old newsmen who, curiously, have sworn, on pain of expulsion, never to utter its name in the press--a quaintness by which I will abide.

I had lunch yesterday, in the members' dining room, with...

Google is under media attack.

Rupert Murdoch is the most outspoken anti-Googlist, but his fulminations are now followed by a new book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, by the New Yorker's media writer, Ken Auletta--the closest thing the media world has to a court biographer--which...