Last summer I was fortunate enough to be able to contribute a profile of Army Archerd to American Express's exquisite 50th Anniversary book Extraordinary Lives: Members Since 1958, which AmEx created and sent, during the 2008-9 holiday season, to its 50-year-long members. The coffee-table sized volume, with a foreword by...

He was a lithe, light-skinned African American who grew up in a Pacific Rim state, had briefly served in one of the nation's most elite patriotic institutions, and had, in a couple of years' time, become the most charismatic man in America, so wildly adored by upscale young whites he...

The headline on last night's news story -- BOB DYLAN VILLIAN: WILLIAM ZANTZINGER DIES -- got me.

Reading those words, I was transported back to my teenage bedroom in West L.A., where, in the mid-'60s, my sister Lizzie and I struggled to out-do each other in climbing...

Having spent much of the last six years re-conjuring what it was like to have come of age during the second half of the 1960s -- when girls were newly, defiantly sexual while America was still numbly, dumbly sexist -- DVD-ing the whole first season of Mad Men (which...

I don't think of any of us who, in 1968, felt like rare kayakers pushing off from the known continent called You Had To Get Married Right After College could imagine that 40 years later there'd be a stiletto stampede to see the film poised to exponentially phenomenize the already-branded...

The Sixties are back. Patronized for the last quarter-century as "crunchy," then shown up as pathetically irony-challenged by the bebop-hatted members of the Gawker generation, we are suddenly invited to be in their thrall again. This weekend, The New York Times Book Review is featuring five books about the radical...

Are you allowed to blog on HuffPost if your politics are a patchwork, rather than a straight-up-and-down liberal party line? (For the record, I am not a classic liberal -- maybe not a liberal at all -- when it comes to violent crime and real -- as opposed to...

This month did not bring the happy Mother's Day that Haleh Bakhash, 40, of Washington, D.C., had once anticipated--not with her mother Haleh Esfandiari, languishing unjustly in an Iranian jail.

The last time Bakhash saw her mom was in December, just before Esfandiari flew off to Iran for what was...

In September 1993, from her hospital bed, plugged into oxygen, my elderly mother motioned for her yellow legal pad. In a squiggly hand she slowly scratched out a lede on Heidi Fleiss's new pajama line, another on Liz Taylor's husband's eye job. "Call these in," she told my sister. Those...

Having written my first two Huffington Postings on earnest investigative subjects involving young people who got sick and died because of corruption in powerful places, I figure I can now scoot from the highest to the lowest form of posting: the unadulterated, will-I-respect-myself-in-the-morning-for-pressing-SEND? id-dump. Here goes:

This morning, upon...

Four years ago this month I started writing the first nationally published article on the unusual preponderance of three types of cancers among alumni and teachers at my alma mater, Beverly Hills High. Toxins emitted by the 17 oil wells adjacent to and under the school were suspected to...

So there's a website kerfuffle between National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg and Salon' s Glenn Greenwald about Dana Priest's Washington Post investigative reports which revealed conditions of dire neglect for injured and inform U.S. soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital. Goldberg said he doesn't particularly trust Priest's...