Americans Like Fat Books And Thin Women.

Rereading A.j. Liebling Carries Me Happily Back To An Age When All Good Journalists Knew They Had Plenty To Be Modest About, And Were.

Caution: These Verses May Be Hazardous To Your Solemnity.

Few Expected Very Much Of Franklin Roosevelt On Inauguration Day In 1933. Like Barack Obama Seventy-six Years Later, He Was Succeeding A Failed Republican President, And Americans Had Voted For Change. What That Change Might Be Roosevelt Never Clearly Said, Probably Because He Himself Didn't Know.

Reporters Thrive On The World's Misfortune. For This Reason They Often Take An Indecent Pleasure In Events That Dismay The Rest Of Humanity.

So There He Is At Last. Man On The Moon. The Poor Magnificent Bungler! He Can't Even Get To The Office Without Undergoing The Agonies Of The Damned, But Give Him A Little Metal, A Few Chemicals, Some Wire And Twenty Or Thirty Billion Dollars And Vroom! There He Is, Up On A Rock A Quarter Of A Million Miles Up In The Sky.