Two-time National Magazine Award winner Michael Wolff is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the founder of news aggregator newser.com. His latest book is The Man Who Owns the News, a biography of Rupert Murdoch, based on nine months of interviews with Murdoch and his family and associates. His work has been widely anthologized and appeared in numerous publications, including New York magazine, where he was a long-time columnist. He has also been an entrepreneur involved with the start-up of many businesses, including, in 1993, his first Internet company.

Blog Entries by Michael Wolff

Books Are Bad for You

Posted November 23, 2009 | 01:08 PM (EST)


A few years ago, writing about the book business and how dumbed down and craven books had become--and pathetic, designed only to sell and then not selling--I wrote the line "books suck," subjecting me to much middlebrow opprobrium.

I'd like to revise that line: Books are evil.

They're pernicious....

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The Health-Care Wars Have Just Begun

Posted November 20, 2009 | 12:42 PM (EST)


My 84-year-old mother was full of venomous indignation at dinner last night over the great mammogram take-back. Bureaucrats, in her view, will happily kill women to save money. My colleague, Caroline Miller, Newser's editor in chief, took umbrage in this space the other day about the new guidelines....

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Sarah Palin Deserves Some More Attention

2 Comments | Posted November 19, 2009 | 01:47 PM (EST)


This is a phenomenon that just keeps giving.

Its very lack of explanation, and ensuing incredulity and apoplexy, propel it.

There may not have ever been anything like it in modern American politics. Well, Ronald Reagan perhaps. But his was, at least, a 20-year phenomenon. In little more than a...

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China and the Obese: The President Meets His Greatest Problems

Posted November 18, 2009 | 01:48 PM (EST)


For all sorts of obvious reasons, it seems like a greatly unacceptable and possibly discriminatory thing to say that the obese are a lot like the Chinese (though it's unclear which group, if either, is being slurred). But hear me out.

It is simple math. In eight years, according to...

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Rupert Murdoch's Guy Gets It

Posted November 17, 2009 | 02:26 PM (EST)


If Arthur Miller were at it again, he'd call the play Death of a PR Guy.

Gary Ginsberg, Murdoch's PR guy who got the ax yesterday, used to beg me not to call him a PR Guy--his official title was Executive VP of Global Marketing and Corporate Affairs--but that was...

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The President Wants You to Know He's Too Dopey to Use Twitter

2 Comments | Posted November 16, 2009 | 10:46 AM (EST)


"First of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. I notice that young people--you know, they're very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone. But I'm a big believer in technology, and I'm a big believer in...

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Does Warren Buffett Know What He's Talking About?

Posted November 13, 2009 | 12:14 PM (EST)


Nobody I know who is smart and rich (albeit much less rich than they used to be) thinks the economy is patched up and ready to roll--except, apparently, Warren Buffet (who I don't actually know), who announced yesterday that "the financial panic is behind us."

But then he...

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Is Lou Dobbs the Last Conservative Pundit?

Posted November 12, 2009 | 11:19 AM (EST)


At the top of the Internet boom, Lou Dobbs left CNN to start his ill-fated Space.com, from which he returned ignominiously not long after. Dobbs left CNN again yesterday, at what is possibly the top of the conservative pundit boom, to, as CNN put it with a certain dig,...

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Who Was the Fort Hood Shooter?

1 Comments | Posted November 11, 2009 | 01:15 PM (EST)


It seems to be coming to this: Was he a Muslim or a nutcase?

The nation's two most sententious conservative columnists have weighed in with their view. Both David Brooks, in the Times, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, believe that the evidence--ie, he was a practicing...

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Rupert Murdoch: The Internet Does Not Exist

Posted November 10, 2009 | 11:58 AM (EST)


Rupert continues his war with the Internet. Over the weekend, he told an interviewer (the interviewer, on Sky News Australia, works for him) that as part of his campaign to charge users for reading his content, what he plans to do is to block Google from indexing his newspapers.

...
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The Health Bill Will Pass. Won't It?

Posted November 9, 2009 | 01:58 PM (EST)


I think they have it. If they don't have the votes for the best and purest version of the bill, I think they at least have a fallback position which holds 60 votes.

I believe this has to be true because you wouldn't risk your presidency and place in...

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Galleon Scandal: Shocked, Shocked by Insider Trading

Posted November 6, 2009 | 01:11 PM (EST)


How is it that we get a major insider trading scandal every two decades or so? The last big one, which ultimately ensnarled Michael Milken, the legendary junk bond king, happened in the late eighties. The current one, with a mass of arrests yesterday, threatens the hedge fund industry.

...
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Rupert Murdoch Is Mad but Cute

Posted November 5, 2009 | 12:12 PM (EST)


The Wall Street Journal was a great paper. It is still a pretty great paper but it is not the great Wall Street Journal. That former paper, with its particular look and feel and characteristically myopic focus on business and finance, has departed the stage, replaced by a vigorous, strong-minded...

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Skype Lives!

Posted November 4, 2009 | 11:59 AM (EST)


I follow entrepreneurial dramas the way other people follow sports (did somebody win the World Series?). In these comedies, tragedies, or farces, people really do rise beyond human limitations or get ignominiously crushed. Sometimes there are second chances. Entrepreneurs--true entrepreneurs--pride themselves, like none-too-bright boxers, on their ability to take a...

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Why the GOP Will Rise Again

5 Comments | Posted November 3, 2009 | 12:48 PM (EST)


The strange business that is going on in New York's 23rd Congressional District, which occupies some other universe than the one commonly associated with New York, wherein the designated middle of the road Republican fell to a crypto-fascist sort conservative, is meant to signal, at least for liberals, an...

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Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston: How They Took America

Posted November 2, 2009 | 12:58 PM (EST)


Of all the outcomes of the 2008 presidential election, the strangest, beyond the rise of Sarah Palin herself, is the success of Levi Johnston.

He, in fact, may be the antidote to her rise, dogging her with his smile and his scabrous asides.

Or, as likely, they enable each...

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Why the Media Is Taking So Long to Die

Posted October 30, 2009 | 12:50 PM (EST)


I participated the other night in an oddly formal, anglophilic, Oxford-style, for-and-against-the-proposition debate on the topic of (you guessed it) the mainstream media. I was on the side arguing (you guessed again) that it should be buried as fast as possible.

My side, with NPR host John Hockenberry and Politico...

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How the Internet Got Lost and Why Google's GPS Won't Show Us the Way Out

Posted October 29, 2009 | 02:17 PM (EST)


I had lunch yesterday with my old friend and former colleague, Chip Bayers, who, 15 years ago this week, after having left my fledgling Internet business in New York, helped start HotWired in San Francisco. This is significant because advertising on the Internet started with HotWired's launch and because it...

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Pot Will Save Us

2 Comments | Posted October 28, 2009 | 01:53 PM (EST)


Wow. Pot. Just like that, on its way to being legalized. Well, just like that after 50 years or so.

In order to save itself from financial oblivion, the state of California seems inclined to just do it. Just say yes. To become Amsterdam.

It may be the...

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Is Obama a Sleaze?

2 Comments | Posted October 27, 2009 | 01:11 PM (EST)


So it turns out there's a reason the president hasn't wrapped up health care or Iraq, figured out Afghanistan, closed Guantanamo, or found anybody a job. He's been out raising money.

He's been schmoozing, and golfing, and kissing ass.

The Wall Street Journal has outlined in quite excruciating detail...

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