Lips Get Smacked

By Bruce Buschel Philadelphia Magazine January 1993 You don’t often see a contortionist wearing a black leather Red skins cap in the baccarat pit playing around with $20,000 at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. You stop and watch. Though seated, his body is arced like a...

Heaven is a (Minor League) Hockey Town

By Scott Raab GQ April 1995 My dad began taking me with him to hockey games in 1958, when I was 6. Our team was the Cleveland Barons of the American Hockey League, and they played in the Cleveland Arena, where my dad had gone to see boxing in the 1940s. He became a...

Jocks Are Lousy Lovers

By Allison Glock GQ April 1995 I met the first boy I ever had sex with at the roller rink. He was a speed skater and could rubber leg, which at the time made him more attractive than the nerdy science-fair boys who had to rent their skates and couldn’t even do the...

The Doc Will See You Now, Mr. Perez

By Peter Richmond The National Sports Daily April 8, 1990 The day Pascual Perez has finally reached the New York Yankees spring training camp, a clubhouse man entrusted with Perez’s jewelry bag is unable to resist the temptation to put it on the scale on which the New...

Ivana, the Survivor

By Elizabeth Kaye The New York Times May 10, 1992 Ivan Zelnickova Trump never objected to personifying the salient maxim of the 1980’s, which was that everything worth anything could be bought. Her faith in this dainty precept was even more unwavering than that of the...

“Literature Isn’t a Moral Beauty Contest”

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Philip Roth died a few days ago at the age of 85. My favorite tribute comes from Zadie Smith in The New Yorker: He was a writer all the way down. It was not diluted with other things as it is—mercifully!—for the rest of us. He was...

On Disney

By Sergei Eisenstein From On Disney 1986 Alma-Ata, 16, November 1941 ‘The work of this master is the greatest contribution of the American people to art.’ Dozens and dozens of newspaper clippings, modifying this sentence in various ways, pour down upon the astonished...

Don’t Look Now

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Down at the School of Visual Arts archive they’ve got a tidy selection of James McMullan’s magazine work from the Sixties through the Eighties. I love this one, a cover for New West magazine circa 1979. In his wonderful book, Revealing...

Wolfe and Breslin and the Birth of New York Magazine

By Richard Kluger From The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune 1986 Of all James Bellows’s efforts to strengthen the Tribune, none was more striking than his willingness to take chances on new young writers, whom he encouraged to work in whatever...

Jimmy the Greek: The Living Dead

By Peter Richmond The National Sports Daily April 13, 1990 His words break the silence of a breakfast conversation that has wound down to nothing. They are as soft and insubstantial as rust flaking away, so soft that at first you think you might have heard him wrong,...

The Purple Decades

By James Wolcott The New York Review of Books November 4, 1982 The Purple Decades: A Reader   by Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 396 pp., $17.50 Not since Garry Wills uncorked his rather fanciful notions on the origins of the cold war in the opening pages of...

The Ice Cream Man with the Clean White Suit

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Tom Wolfe died a couple of days ago and if you have never read his entertaining and much-celebrated non-fiction, well, now is as good a time as any to dig in. Start with the relatively straight-forward “The Marvelous Mouth of Cassius...