By Tom Teicholz at 13 August, 2004, 7:52 pm
Reading “The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel” (W. Norton & Co., 2002) in paperback, edited by Babel’s daughter, Nathalie, got me thinking about Jewish gangsters and tough guys.
Babel was born in Odessa in 1894. He wrote of Odessa’s Jewish underworld and its gangsters in sparkling prose. Fifty years before Mario Puzo gave us “The Godfather,” [...]
I thought I would be blogging and working straight through the holidays — and trust me there’s stuff to write about:. I want to tell you about recent visits to the restaurants Sushi Zo, Michael Mina’s Louis XIV, Slumdog, the wrester, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, and Jim Harrison’s The English Major — but suddenly I’ve lost [...]
Last night at a dinner party, the talk was about Madoff, as I’m sure it is at Hannukah parties and Holiday get-togethers everywhere. One attendee who had a long and storied career in finance told me that he knew Madoff and was shocked — “Madoff was a pillar,” he said, “He was head of Nasdaq!” But [...]
On today’s New York Times Op_Ed page there is a beautiful story by Ted Gup about a pseudonymous donor in 1933 Depression era Canton Ohio, who took out an ad in the local newspaper and gave money to those in need in five and ten dollar increments to a total of 75 townsmen and families [...]
Is it my imagination or has David Geffen been extremely silent as of late? No mention of Geffen in any of the Save MOCA Discussion, despite one of the MOCA outposts being called The Geffen contemporary. No mention of Geffen in the LA Times imploding. Remember when he wanted to buy the paper? No mention of Geffen in [...]
As she writes in The Daily Beast, Alexandra Penney, self help author and former editor of Self magazine lost all her savings in the Madoff fraud. Read it here.
Today’s Paul Krugman column in the New York times is one of the most damning indictments of the Wall Steet/hedge fund fiancial cutlure of the recent era — showing that when people ask how could Madoff have gotten away with it, why didn’t anyone notice? that there’s a reason why. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/opinion/19krugman.html?ref=opinion
Jeremy Piven, the actor best known for playing Ari Gold on Entourage, is leaving the cast of the revival of David Mamet’s “Speed the Plow.” In interviews Piven claimed he had to leave for medical reasons: that he had a high Mercury coun. A what? Mamet’s response to Variety was as follows, “My understanding is that [...]
Since the first rumblings of the Madoff scandal, the Jewish Journal has been on top of the reporting on the subject. They have even launched a blog called, Swindler’s List, which has been written up all over the web and even in Variety among other publications. Hits at the website have never been so high.
Finally finished reading the George Plimpton Oral history/biography and I have to say it gave the full measure of the man — and gave a sense of his strengths his weaknesses, his triumphs and accomplishments, his insecurites and failings but mostly his embrace of being George Plimpton. One of the interesting comments in the book was [...]
Last night I was at a Christmas party. There were drinks and good food, and even a few celebrities. There were carolers, and children running around, and old friends greeting one another. And I saw a few angels. One was a former studio executive now an independent producer who told me about how a chidlhood friend [...]
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