Meghan McCain Has a Temper Just Like Her Father’sThe daughter of the presidential hopeful sulked outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the other night, and more in our daily gossip roundup.
The New York ‘Times’ Hates ChildrenThis morning, in her always thoughtful and eloquent Post column, Andrea Peyser finally blows the whistle on the New York Times’ long-standing bias against children.
‘NYT’ Wins the Race to Review the New ‘Harry Potter’Setting a new land-speed record for book reviewing, the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani somehow managed to read all 759 pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and crank out 1,135 words on the tome in less than one day
Norm!Norman Mailer still hates Michiko Kakutani, dislikes Janet Maslin, too, and did an interview with Martha Stewart for her TV show. CNN execs went on a corporate retreat to the Bahamas, and “Page Six,” presumably on behalf of Fox News, mocks them for it. If you complain at Nobu, Drew Nieporent might blacklist you. Peter Cook, Christie Brinkley’s soon-to-be ex-husband, went grocery shopping. (Cindy Adams, meantime, dubs Brinkley Professor Emeritus in How to Handle El Piggo, which she actually means as a compliment.) Retired Ford Models vet Neil Hamil to run Elite Models. There’s a reality show being shopped in which ten virgin men compete to lose it to “a celeb.”
cultural capital
The Book Reviewer’s SongIn all the brouhaha over Christopher Hitchens’s paean to poop jokes in the new Vanity Fair, you might have missed the Proust Questionnaire with literary warhorse Norman Mailer. The venerable writer-cum-political agitator dishes on his hatred for Reagan, Bush, Hitler, and — oh, yeah — Pulitzer-winning Times book critic Michiko Kakutani:
What is your greatest fear?
That I will never meet Michiko Kakutani and so not be able to tell her what I think of her. She has an unseemly haste to rush into print with the first very bad review of any book I write. She does this ahead of publication. That is a strategy. If the first review of a book is dreadful, an author needs at least three good ones to change that first impression.
Hitler, in comparison, gets off easy. Not that we’re surprised: We hear he thought pretty highly of The Naked and the Dead.
Proust Questionnaire: Normal Mailer [VF]
