Longreads

This article will appear in The New York Review’s June 6, 2013 issue. Dmitry Kostyukov/The New York Times From left: Anzor Tsarnaev and Zebeidat Tsarnaev, the parents of the alleged Boston…

This Tuesday, a week before Barack Obama’s second inauguration, FRONTLINE will air a probing look at the first four years of his presidency. With inside accounts from his battles with his…

We saw this trend approaching a million consumer-miles away. It was inevitable: the Protest Generation comes of age as the Generation of Super-Consumers.    -Faith Popcorn, 1991  …

May 12, 2008  

May 12, 2008  

Seven days after September 11, 2001, I left New York to do two weeks of book promotion, under other circumstances a predictable kind of trip. You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive-time radio, you do an “event,” a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service, and leave a 5 AM call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city. During the week between September 11 and the Wednesday morning when I went to Kennedy to get on the plane, none of these commonplace aspects of publishing a book seemed promising or even appropriate things to be doing. But—like most of us who were in New York that week—I was in a kind of protective coma, sleepwalking through a schedule made when planning had still seemed possible. #Sept11

But Christopher Hitchens! Ach, Christopher Hitchens. How I have loved him, despite the ordeals he has put me through. He'll go and be a fearful crank about atheism or "Islamofascism" for ages and I get all mad, and then he writes this freaking brilliant column about the Murdoch scandals and I'm crazy about him again. Old loves are like that.