Why can’t little Tiffany learn to program? What happened to American genius for math? I’ve been wondering about this for a long time, but suddenly I saw the cause during the World Series last night. Imagine a computer that runs on chewing tobacco. Shouldn’t be that hard — just picture your basic Major League Baseball manager, leaning on the dugout rail. He looks worried. Then he spits. That one. Now, if you could look inside the heads of the two guys running the contenders in the World Serie... Read Full Story

Turns out that running a political campaign on a vague, all-inclusive slogan like “Hope” can be a dangerous game. For the idealistic among us, Obama’s call for us to unleash our hope meant unleashing that latent desire for a new kind of politics. For the needy, hope could mean emergency help right now, on the line. “Hope for me is I’ll finally get a good job.” “I’ll be able to get my teeth fixed.” “I’ll be able to pay for my wi... Read Full Story

If you read the N.Y.Times in its coverage of the disruption of the Kindle, you might think that publishers are losing a fortune from the sudden rise in Kindle sales. Actually, the opposite is true. Amazon is buying Kindle rights from publishers at the same price they’re paying for physical books. And Amazon is sticking with its policy to sell Kindle books at no more than $9.99. So take your average $20 list price hardcover book (if I were a shameless self-promoter, I would use my book T... Read Full Story

Search and advertising giant Google and Ohio Art, maker of the children’s classic drawing toy announced a joint venture today to produce the first e-book reader for pre-schoolers. Named the Etch a Book, the new reader will capitalize on the highly refined Etch a Sketch two knob interface which is already familiar to millions of parents and children all over the globe. In making the announcement, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, revealed that Google has been scanning children’s literature o... Read Full Story

When my youngest, Max, was 8, he could run off a string of complicated jokes like an old pro in the Catskills. Really, he could have become a regular on the Tonight Show. That good. We loved to talk about what was funny. I asked him what a really, really great joke would do. “People would laugh until they cried.” Exactly. It was then that I came up with an idea that almost drove Max crazy. That wasn’t the purpose, of course, but that’s the way it worked out for awhile. I told Max there was... Read Full Story

Calling in those McKinsey folks to review your profit and loss numbers in the middle of the deepest recession since the 1930s is a little like having Dr. Kevorkian over to offer a second opinion. “No, really, I’m feeling fine. Just a little touch of the flu.” “Not at your age. You know, if you were a new publication, you might pull through. But Harold started you back in 1925. That’s a long, long haul for a weekly. But look on the bright side: it’s been a g... Read Full Story

My heartfelt condolences to Ruth Reichl and all the other employees and freelancers who made Gourmet Magazine the most-waited for package in our mailbox every month. We have been subscribers, with occasional time off, since the 60s, when few of us would venture to actually cook any of the insanely complex recipes. Now, I wasn’t the actual subscriber to Gourmet. The person of record was my mate. At the time, I was very serious about being serious about everything and dwelling on food seemed t... Read Full Story

When I was involved with …and Ladies of the Club a few eons ago I received an offer for the audio rights for the book. This was to be a condensed version, since the book was more than 1000 pages long. I asked for a sample script from the audio producer, and it turned out to run some 75 pages. You had to laugh. Gone were the inner lives of the two principal characters. Gone was the story of the fifty years of the development of the U.S. from the Civil War to the Depression. Gone were th... Read Full Story

My mother was a live book reviewer in Cleveland, an activity that seems to have gone the way of the traveling magic lantern lecture tent show. Fortunately for Mom, the traffic lights in our community were exceedingly slow, and she always had a book by her side. We joked that she had completed War and Peace just by judicious use of her time at red lights. Book reviewers were prime entertainment at women’s organizations until somewhere around the late 1960s, possibly replaced by book club... Read Full Story

Oh to sing the joys of Sunday morning with the NY Times Book Review section, where we can discover which books are going to get their second Times review. This morning the winner was E.L. Doctorow’s novelistic treatment of the hoarding Collyer brothers, a story apparently of immense import to the editors of the Times. Our first indication that Doctorow was about to get a Full Friedman wasn’t Michiko Kakutani’s review in the daily Times on August 31st. No, it was the PR-gener... Read Full Story