By Helen Lawrenson From The Hussy’s Handbook 1944 Offhand, I can’t think of anything I don’t like as much as I don’t like intellectuals. I suppose they have their uses, the same as adversity and the study of Latin verbs—but they are accordingly as unpleasant and as...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader April 20, 2020 Ron Rosenbaum is in the pantheon of great non-fiction writers alongside Wolfe, Didion, Trillin, Talese, and Thompson. He’s been a newspaper columnist, a virtuoso magazine feature and profile writer, and author of...
By Helen Dudar The New York Times October 4, 1992 To anyone who has been keeping a careful watch, it would seem as if Annabella Sciorra has been making movies almost without pause. In fewer than four years, she has appeared in seven films, in small and large roles,...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader April 16, 2020 You can add Jeffrey Smith to the list of illustrators we admire—a group that includes Robert Weaver, Jim McMullan, Robert Giusti, and Julian Allen. Smith is prolific and terrific as you can see for yourself at his...
By Fred Schruers Circus June 22, 1978 It’s 1:30 am in the Bootlegger Lounge in Syracuse, N.Y. Elvis Costello, the one with the owlish stare and the spitting mad vocals, the man whose songs may be the worst thing that’s happened to feminism since Jack the Ripper,...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader April 13, 2020 O’Connell Driscoll is a great name for a writer, the kind of byline that sticks. Trouble is bylines are easily forgotten and the history of magazine writing is littered with terrific writers who are neglected and Driscoll...
By Bruce Handy Spy May, 1992 To artists and intellectuals, the twentieth century has posed no questions more vexing than these: First, can art make sense of the Holocaust? And second, why do the French love Jerry Lewis? The first question can’t really be answered, at...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader April 11, 2020 Last summer, I spent a few hours with the illustrator Robert Giusti at his beautiful home. Just a terrific, unpretentious guy—and great company—Giusti did a lot of magazine work in the ’70s and ’80s, but his most famous...
By Chip Brown Harper’s February 1992 From the outset the deaths had come in flurries, often at night when the house was hushed, and so it was no surprise last May that when Bill died Hector followed on his heels, and then Harvey, and then Jack. The news was posted in...
By John Schulian The Stacks Reader April 8, 2020 When I heard that John Prine lay dying in a Nashville hospital, I couldn’t help wondering if he had found time beforehand to fill out his 2020 census questionnaire. It was hardly the kind of reverent thought the moment...
By Tom Junod Life April 1991 “Are you safe?” is what she always asks the children. It is what she asks the exhausted little boy who has just driven nonstop with his mother from New Hampshire to Atlanta in a rattling VW bus; what she asks the hotel-bound boy whose last...
By Lawrence Wright Rolling Stone December 13th-27th, 1990 “I had meant to time the closing of the door with a subtle emission of a fart,” my guru said as he pulled shut the door to his room at the Holiday Inn in Oxford, Mississippi. “Evidently my timing was off.” He...
