Page 2

Lincoln did more than utter eloquent addresses, or emancipate three million slaves, or make himself something out of nothing. He navigated the turbulent waters of a democracy that was being ripped apart by civil war, brought that war to a successful conclusion, and cajoled friends and enemies alike into following his direction. "The Tycoon," as his […]

In Jean Becker and Tom Collamore's Don't Tell the President, an oral history of the world of presidential advance, the authors provide a sense of what it's like to do advance work for a president or presidential candidate. Although this type of work has in some ways become easier with the advent of smartphones that allow teams to maintain contact with White House or campaign headquarters at all times, advance men and women are typically sent out to remote locations with minimal supervision and maximal responsibility. These teams face real, hard deadlines. The president will be at a certain time or place. The advance people must make sure everything runs smoothly. If they do their job perfectly, no one will notice. But if they screw up, the failed event will be blasted all over the evening news and the next day's headlines and become the fodder for late-night comics and the candidate's electoral foes. The post Prepping for the President appeared first on .

In 2001, six-year-old Haley Zega got lost on a family hike in the Arkansas wilderness. She was found after three days where she survived drinking river water. Now there’s a book about it. What does it take to be a book? Novelist and Bard College professor Benjamin Hale is Haley’s uncle, so he wrote an article about it in Harper’s. When an article is expanded into a book, you wonder how much extra filling you get in the reading. A lot of books should be articles, rather than the other way around. (A lot of articles should be Substack posts, a lot of posts should be tweets, and a lot of tweets shouldn’t exist at all.) The post Strange but True Crime appeared first on .

For wayward souls craving a dose of old-school, real-deal country music, there's an obscure but surefire remedy, a 1973 low-budget cult movie called Payday. It stars wild-man actor Rip Torn in a career performance as Maury Dann, a pill-popping, pistol-toting, whiskey-swigging country singer with scimitar sideburns and a bad attitude working his way down the music-biz food chain. The post Hardcore Country Hero appeared first on .