Author Archive

The Overpaid Jokers at TheStreet.com

Written by John Strausbaugh on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

I’ve met Cramer twice now, and I don’t know, I kind of like him. It’s true he’s not a suave Master of the Universe type—he plays up his Jersey-by-way-of-Philly bumpkin side, the rumpled shirts, the wife and kids back home, the humble offices of his Wall St. hedge fund Cramer, Berkowitz & Co. It’s true he’s an odd combo, part
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Were Some Pirates Poofters?

Written by John Strausbaugh on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Were a lot of pirates poofters? Or to put that more politely: Was there much homosexual activity in pirate society? On the surface it seems one of those Pope-Polish questions. Gay historian B.R. Burg, in his classic, and controversial, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (originally published by NYU Press in 1983), simply assumed that of course there was, and offered
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Grimmer Fairy Tales

Written by John Strausbaugh on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

In an era when parents who discipline their kids can be treated like felons, and everybody, “in the wake of Littleton,” is maundering about the effects of violent entertainments on young minds, you wouldn’t think Heinrich Hoffmann’s DerStruwwelpeter would have much of a following. In fact, unless I’m mistaken,it seems to be enjoying a kind of cult revival. First
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An Unoriginal New Magazine Falls on Tin Eyes

Written by John Strausbaugh on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Will no one at the Voice edit Cynthia Cotts, even when she’s demonstrating the deepest ignorance about her subject? Here’s her opener to last week’s “Press Clips” column, a disastrous side trip from straight media reporting, at which she’s bad enough, into a realm of the most crass poetasting:   Go to the back of St. Mark’s Bookshop on East
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The Unabomber’s Pen Pal

Written by John Strausbaugh on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Even as a judge is finding Ted Kaczynski’s first round of appeals “wholly without merit,” the Vermont law professor who helped him craft the approach is on the phone to me, confidently predicting that eventually the Unabomber will get his day in court. “I keep stopping myself from calling it a ‘retrial,’ because it is not really a retrial,” Michael Mello
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Jesus vs. Freud

Written by John Strausbaugh on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Mental health professionals tend to react to Seth Farber’s ideas with the sort of shock and outrage with which heresy is condemned by faithful religious types. “Don’t touch this book with a twenty foot pole,” one of them wrote his publisher on reading the manuscript that would become his latest book, Unholy Madness (InterVarsity Press, 162 pages, $12.99). “I suspect
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We Who Aren’t About to Die…

Written by John Strausbaugh on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

In One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse offered a handy metaphor for the ritual use of military power in the modern world. This was 1964, full-on Cold War, both the U.S. and Soviet Union bristling with nuclear missiles and racing each other to build more, and everyone living under the perceived threat that a nuclear holocaust could break out tomorrow. If you
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Hands Off the Bill of Rights, Leeza!

Written by John Strausbaugh on . Posted in Breaking News, Posts

On her sub-Rosie talk show one morning last week, Leeza Gibbons and her guests were going on about youth violence and gun control when someone cited the Second Amendment. Well, Leeza plotzed. Forget the Second Amendment, Leeza huffed. Forget the Constitution altogether. It’s ancient history. It was written by a bunch of old men. Kids
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