Generally I think it's nice to follow someone who follows me on Instagram. But I make exceptions for people whose photos are mostly of themselves.
Why is Twitter giving me the tweets of people I don’t care about? If I wanted to hear from Chelsea Clinton about her joy at being pregnant again I would follow her. Is the company trying to be like my sister-in-law at Christmas, gifting me with things I didn’t even know I wanted? If so they’re way, way off.
I went to hear Ben Stein speak as part of the Broward College Speakers Series last night. He has had a varied career: lawyer, professor, economist, actor, writer (speeches, articles, books, diaries, screenplays), and quiz show host. I was most familiar with his work in these last two roles, having been a fan of Win Ben Stein’s Money (my, and many people’s, first introduction to Jimmy Kimmel) and a bipartisan reader of print media.
His conservative side came through when he expressed incomprehension at the vitriol directed at the current president. Perhaps understandable for a man who not only worked for but “loved” Richard Nixon. But Nixon, for all his deviousness, possessed intelligence and political savvy; Trump’s grasp of history and economics, Stein admitted, is like that of a child. He added that he simply knows how to make money, which is not the same thing as economic knowledge.
Still, when asked whose economic policy he would suggest the nation adopt he answered without hesitation: Clinton’s.
He said he owed a great deal to Kimmel for all that the current talk show host had done for him. (I would think the debt and the gratitude would be in Kimmel’s court). Recalling his high school years, he said that he and his friends used to play Scrabble in Latin. He described his wife of over 50 years as a “goddess, a deity come down from heaven” and left the audience with an image of them lying in bed at night watching documentaries of the two world wars.
Yesterday the New York Times Travel section published its annual list of the 52 places to go in the new year. As someone who’s come up with similar, though smaller, lists, I know how arbitrary they are. Though it was gratifying to see Columbus, Ohio, included – a city I wrote about in 1994 on the centenary of the birth of James Thurber, a native son who went unmentioned in yesterday’s write-up (despite the fact that the house he grew up in is now a museum).
My photos on Instagram never fail to get a good number of likes, while my bons mots on Twitter – which are much harder to come up with – usually go ignored (by a much larger group of followers). Twitter is the ‘yeah, whatever’ teenager of social media.
Most of the eulogies for the Weekly Standard mentioned the magazine’s excellent writing, though none I saw mentioned the man who was responsible for much of it: Philip Terzian. Phil was the literary editor of the Standard for most of its existence, in addition to being the unsigned author of its witty end-page parodies.
I contributed to the back-of-the-book from time to time, mostly with book reviews – Jan Morris, Clive James, Geoff Dyer – though sometimes with stories that would have had – that did have – a hard time finding homes elsewhere. These included an account of a high-minded Mediterranean cruise, a screed on the glut of books about the pilgrimage to Santiago in Spain, and a cheerful essay on the much-maligned author book tour. This last piece became probably the only article from a political weekly to be included in The Best American Travel Writing, chosen by that famous neo-con Anthony Bourdain.