In Paris, Doug is “Doo-GLAHS,” or “monsieur le second gentleman.” He is aw-shucksy, surprisingly soft-spoken, overwhelmed but electrified by the past three weeks. He cites “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” to illustrate his SoCal adolescence, and there’s a whisper of Spicolian blasé even when his remarks are as bland as a legal brief. He looks like your dad’s golfing buddy, your county commissioner, your guidance counselor — not necessarily the man who would headline a fundraiser in a gated cul-de-sac off ritzy Avenue Foch. (Aug. 11, 2024)
…why is Porter trailed by this cloud of “bad boss” insinuation — and should it matter at all? How can leadership be properly judged in a world built with double standards, and wired with infinite triggers and sensitivities? What is the price of surviving and thriving in politics?
No question: The Hill is a harsh place to work and to lead. No one knows this better than Katie Porter. (Sept. 20, 2023)
The man who lost to George Santos looks like a winner. Chin up. Good humor. Clean-shaven, sparkly-eyed. Navy suit, flag pin, walnut-hued wingtips. Robert P. Zimmerman has dreamed for 40 years of being a congressman, and so Robert P. Zimmerman is still acting like a candidate, even as his would-be constituents greet him with a sympathetic tilt of the head, as if to say: I’m sorry for our loss. (Feb. 1, 2023)
Matt Yglesias can talk about supervolcanoes and about Habsburg federalism and about the semiconductor industry in Taiwan vs. China. He can talk about regulatory sensitivities around geothermal drilling. He can talk normative ethics and the Ghent system and occupational licensing and maritime commerce in Westeros, the fictional realm of “Game of Thrones.” He can talk about all these things and, perhaps more importantly, he can sound like he knows what he’s talking about. (Jan. 11, 2023)
She launched into her new life about noon Friday last week, flying from western Alaska to Anchorage, where she hopped on another plane around 3 a.m. Saturday, then hustled through the Seattle airport for her connecting flight to D.C., and a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives — a thrilling prospect that may, in fact, be quite temporary. (Sept. 16, 2022)
Gordon Sondland is a walking asterisk, a footnote that was once a headline, a man who made some history without really changing the course of it. As memoirs of the Donald Trump presidency have zipped to everyone’s tablets, Sondland has searched his name in their indexes. It usually falls somewhere between “Sergei Magnitsky Act” and “Soros, George.” Sondland hasn’t liked what he has read about himself, as the U.S. ambassador to the European Union from 2018 to 2020. No one’s gotten the Gordon Sondland part of the story exactly right, according to Gordon Sondland. (May 6, 2022)
Something has been replicating in the American mind. It is not microbial. It cannot be detected by nasal swab. To treat an affliction, you must first identify it. But you can’t slide a whole country into an MRI machine. “There’s no diagnosis for this,” Fauci says. “I don’t know what is going on.” (Jan. 27, 2022)
You can’t see Lorne Michaels behind the army of cast and crew, but you can hear him, buffing the show in the free fall between dress rehearsal and air. Studio 8H, his claustrophobic kingdom, is all wires and wigs and wheels and lumber, craftsmanship and ego, raw nerves and unresolved daddy issues. (Nov. 29, 2021)
Sister Megan Rice (1930-2021)
Megan Gillespie Rice — her first name was pronounced “Mee-gan” — was born in New York City on Jan. 31, 1930. She was raised in Morningside Heights, near Columbia University, in a liberal Catholic environment attuned to poverty and human rights. Her parents, an obstetrician and a historian, were friends and followers of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, which opposed the drumbeat of war even after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (Oct. 11, 2021)
Last autumn, a pilot whale washed up on a cobblestone beach in Nova Scotia that happens to be Jane Alexander’s yard. The carcass was seven feet long. It was a baby. No apparent cause of death. Skin like the finest Italian leather: dark black with a gray glow. (Sept. 25, 2021)
A post-presidency is its own kind of office, term-limited only by death, and held at any given time by few men, each with their own ideas of how to wield a more abstract kind of power. … Obama has done the typical post-presidential things: laboring over his memoirs (he still owes his publisher a second volume) and overseeing his foundation, which will break ground this autumn on a presidential center and museum on the South Side of Chicago. But Obama also commands his media fiefdom, with his wife as partner, in a way that no other ex-president has. (Aug. 9, 2021)
Donald Rumsfeld (1932-2021)
Into the Great Unknown, then, goes Donald H. Rumsfeld, who died Tuesday at 88, and whose tenure as George W. Bush’s defense secretary was a monument to both ramrod certainty and tactical equivocation, the twin dogmas of Washington. He was a paradox in spectacles, an exacting presence who helped to produce inexact outcomes. (July 1, 2021)
G. Gordon Liddy (1930-2021)
The FBI had an elegant term for G. Gordon Liddy, and that term was “super-klutz.” As with so many self-professed paragons of strategy and masculinity, the man who advertised himself routinely as “virile, vigorous and potent” was most famous for underperforming. (March 31, 2021)
Andrew M. Cuomo has been hustling all his life, up glorious summits and through choppy seas, in the pursuit of control. He hustled as a kid from Queens with his own landscaping business (motto: “We clip you good”) and as an adolescent fixing $300 cars and flipping them for $1,500. As a 24-year-old fresh out of law school, he snookered Ed Koch’s nominating delegates to give his father, Mario M. Cuomo, an edge on the Democratic nomination for governor. As a housing advocate, he battled NIMBYs in Westchester and built shelters on the edge of Brooklyn; meanwhile, he married into the Kennedys and befriended the Clintons. At 39, he became a visionary Cabinet secretary who made his inspector general’s life miserable, then watched his life collapse around a clumsy first bid for his father’s office and a divorce that was splayed across the tabloids — only to claw his way back a few years later to become New York’s attorney general and then governor. In his third term, he sang pandemic lullabies to a panicked public that lusted after calm leadership but got, in the end, the same hustle and control that Andrew Cuomo has been practicing for 40 years. (March 17, 2021)
Cloris Leachman (1926-2021)
She always seemed to be playing a character named Ruth — 13 times in her career, in fact — and this somehow made sense. Ruth is the housewife with a secret, the nana with an edge. We never learn Frau Blücher’s first name, but let’s assume it’s Ruth. (Jan. 28, 2021)
This is what some people have been afraid of: that Trumpism will not flame out, that it will instead change shape, that it will acquire perfect chestnut hair and blue suits that fit, that it will trade seething mania for intellectual finesse, that it will blather not about strong walls and weak toilets but about cosmopolitan hegemony, that it will not obsess over stolen elections and evil Democrats but instead lodge procedural complaints that sow doubt about the legitimacy of Democratic victories. And so on Jan. 6, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) objected to the electoral vote count in the name of The People, about eight hours after The People laid siege to his workplace. (Jan. 17, 2021)
Louis DeJoy, postmaster general
DeJoy, raised in a family of Italian Catholics in Suffolk County, N.Y., had distinguished himself in the unglamorous business of getting stuff where it was going. His father, Dominick, ran a small trucking and rigging company in New York and New Jersey. Louis completed a business degree in 1979 from Stetson University in small-town DeLand, Fla., where he was also a “shift commander” for campus security. In the 1980s, DeJoy and his brothers began to diversify and expand the family business — under its original name, New Breed — beyond hauling and leasing and into equipment installation, operations management, and computer and information technology.
The game, in short, was logistics: the coordination of complex systems to deliver a product. (Aug. 31, 2020)
This is the struggle of black police officers, then and now. They sign up for a job that offers a path to a middle-class life and a chance to honor their communities by pledging to protect them, but they can face questions of loyalty from neighbors who are skeptical of law enforcement. They want to “be the change,” then realize what they’re up against: a police culture with a legacy of prejudice, protected by unions, resistant to self-examination and primed to use force. (July 6, 2020)
First, arrive at work before dawn. Then put on a head cover, foot covers, surgical scrubs, and a yellow plastic gown. Next, if one is available, the N95 mask. Fitting it to your face will be the most important 10 seconds of your day. It will protect you, and it will make your head throb. Then, a surgical mask over the N95. A face shield and gloves. Cocooned, you’ll taste your own recycled breath and hear your own heartbeat; you’ll sweat along every slope and crevice of your body. (April 28, 2020)
On the craps table of this campaign, there’s a $500 million chip sitting on “Super Tuesday.” The bettor’s name is mike — small “m,” according to the visual design of his campaign, like he’s your modest neighbor from the split-level down the block instead of a titan of media and finance with estates in Bermuda and Southampton. (March 3, 2020)
The secretary of commerce is 10th in line for the presidency, which is close enough to be important and far away enough to be complacent.Wilbur Ross, the current secretary, is nearly 82, which is old enough to get away with a nap during business hours and young enough to throw on beach khakis, grab a glass of white wine and observe naked people cocooned in plastic wrap at an arts benefit in the Hamptons. He is a quiet man, smart and generous, but he seems detached from reality: too rich to remember how the real world works, too uninterested in his role as commerce secretary to enact much beyond stasis, mortification or bafflement, according to his critics. (Sept. 30, 2019)
As with many Washington sagas, it came down to this: an old man in a charcoal suit who didn’t want to talk. A former Marine just shy of his 75th birthday, dragged into serving his country one last time, though there’s little honor in it now. A hangdog Mona Lisa before a gallery of bobbleheads, subjected in the winter of a dignified career to the indignities of Congress. He had taken a bullet to the thigh in Vietnam, steered the FBI through the wreckage of the 9/11 attacks, and yet on Wednesday — during congressional hearings on his last act of public service — Robert Swan Mueller III seemed wary of the microphone itself. (July 25, 2019)
This city shouldn’t really be here, but it is, and the governor of Washington state shouldn’t really be here, but he was. The two have something to do with each other. Wednesday morning Jay Inslee was 11 floors up a sparkling new high-rise that sits on land that used to be water, and may be water again. Out the window, just over the blue-green Biscayne Bay, was Miami Beach, where roads have been raised a couple inches here, a couple feet there. Wearing moccasins, sockless, Inslee was prepping for his first Democratic presidential debate, which meant introducing himself to Americans, filling them with an overwhelming sense of dread, then making them excited about the future — all in the space of 60 seconds. (June 27, 2019)
She looks and sounds like the Washington wife of yore, with the pearl earrings, the Reagan-red cocktail attire, the sunglasses tiara’d atop her blond bob. At the holidays, she lays wreaths at Arlington and sings carols around the piano with her be-sweatered husband, Clarence, who happens to be the longest-serving justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Memorial Day means a backyard barbecue with star-spangled tablecloths and a sheet cake that reads “God Bless America!”
But meanwhile, on Facebook, she’s behaving like your slightly paranoid neighbor who stockpiles bullets and astronaut food. (Dec. 27, 2018)
Dan Crenshaw’s good eye is good enough, but it’s not great. The iris is broken. The retina is scarred. He needs a special oversized contact lens, and bifocals sometimes, to correct his vision. Six years after getting blown up, he can still see a bit of debris floating in his cornea. His bad eye? Well, his bad eye is gone. Under his eye patch is a false eye that is deep blue. At the center of it, where a pupil should be, is the gold trident symbol of the Navy SEALs. It makes Dan Crenshaw look like a Guardian of the Galaxy. (Nov. 11, 2018)
She is 91. No cane necessary. Thin legs in black tights. Manicured nails painted a dusty rose. She was buoyant and cheery, doling out “grandma hugs” in a chapel at Chatham University, in the same neighborhood as the synagogue. A short walk away was a heap of soggy condolence: Grocery-store bouquets. Thoughts and prayers on poster board, ink running in the rain. “SORRY,” proclaimed one, with blunt simplicity.
The leaves had turned. The city was sitting shiva. The Steelers had won, after a moment of silence. And the pews were filling up at the chapel to hear Magda Brown. (Oct. 29, 2018)
Ben Shapiro / ‘Pod Save America’
Of the Crooked Media guys, Ben Shapiro says: “I disagree with everything they say, but I think they're good at what they do.”
Told that a visiting journalist is seeing Shapiro first, Tommy Vietor says: “Please tell Baby Steve Bannon I say hello.” (Oct. 8, 2018)
On the Fourth of July, when she was still appearing on “The Five,” Guilfoyle posted on Instagram a photo of herself holding hands with Don Jr. on the West Wing colonnade. And there it was: a symbolic portrait of Fox News hand in hand with the Trump family. Two days later, on Breitbart News radio, Guilfoyle praised her boyfriend’s political potential — “I think he is the No. 1 up-and-coming political figure, for sure, on the right” — just as she had done with Gavin Newsom years ago. (Aug. 22, 2018)
Starr is back in his hotel room on the 43rd floor, pouring Pellegrino into a wine glass. Solomon on the brain, he mentions his love for the Book of Ecclesiastes. Wisdom. Folly. Vanity. The more knowledge, the more grief. Life: a chasing after the wind. (Sept. 12, 2018)
She has a Sharpie in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her book party has spilled from a small banquet room onto the fifth-floor terrace of a private literary club in Manhattan. The turbanette is red tonight, a silent siren against the noisy gray dusk and brown monoliths of Midtown. She’s hugging and posing and signing copies of her new memoir. Wineglasses shatter on the stone, to applause. (July 27, 2018)
It was God’s blessings that brought him to us, according to Scott Pruitt’s resignation letter, and so it must be God’s blessings that are taking him away. His exit certainly was a deliverance for some EPA employees leaving work Thursday, shortly after the news broke. (July 7, 2018)
With his blue-steel gaze and steel-gray hair, Lt. Col. Oliver North looked like a movie star against the stale browns and beiges of C-SPAN. His cowlick and gaptoothed grin, though, reminded you of an old neighbor or college roommate. And his voice was mesmerizing when first deployed on the American public during the epic Iran-contra hearings of 1987 — lowering to a reverential hush, or hiccuping with emotion, as if he were drunk on patriotism. (May 9, 2018)
It was her first White House correspondents’ dinner, and her first public event in the United States since a certain photo of hers blew up the Internet last May. In it, Griffin held a dummy head of President Trump, bloodied with red goo, like Perseus and Medusa or something out of a jihad video. (April 29, 2018)
With their blunt catchphrases and outfits color-coordinated to the liquid in Silk’s wineglass, the sisters can come across as just another act in our era’s 3,000-ring circus. But they get to America’s deepest philosophical questions: Who should speak for whom? How can one measure authenticity? (April 26, 2018)
“It’s crazy how one moment can overshadow 15 years of work,” she finally said, running her sparkly purple fingernails over some DVDs in front of her. “I directed all these movies. I know it’s porn, but they aren’t ‘one, two, three, f---.’ These are serious.” (Jan. 21, 2018)
Whether or not Jim Carrey is trying, with a Kaufmanesque flourish, to reclaim some of the success and fame that he’s lost over the years, he has a point. It is here, pairing the prophecy of “The Truman Show” with the resurrection of “Man on the Moon,” that Carrey’s message descends from the realm of celebrity into the life of the viewer. We’re all acting, to a degree. We exaggerate our abilities, we craft a careful image on social media, we allow what others think to infect our behavior in large and small ways. (Nov. 30, 2017)
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team are somewhere underneath Washington, with their flashlights and pickaxes, while the rest of us remain aboveground, peering at the ominous cumulonimbus around Carter Page, scanning every inopportune grin, every halt in his speech, every bounce of an eyebrow. He’s capable of both oversharing and evasion, sometimes in the same breath, and our collective paranoia flares: Is he just a goofball, or is this some kind of act? (Nov. 16, 2017)
His fitness studio in Beverly Hills is shuttered. On its stoop is a sun-bleached edition of the Beverly Hills Courier from January. Inside is the wreckage of a livelihood: piles of debris, tongues of pink insulation, a dusting of pulverized drywall on the ballet barres. In the middle of it all, a forlorn scale where his students measured pounds sacrificed to the oldies. (March 11, 2017)
Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917-2016)
Zsa Zsa Gabor lived many celebrity lifetimes in one. She sang opera, won beauty pageants, waged feuds, suffered strokes, raised horses, “wrote” books, made exercise videos, lost limbs, slipped into comas, awoke from comas, sued and was sued, dated Kissinger, danced with Tito, bedded Ataturk, assumed the mantle of princess and duchess, punched a Spanish cop in the 1960s, slapped a Beverly Hills cop in the 1980s, allegedly used Evian to bathe during her three days in jail, bought Elvis’s hilltop mansion in Bel Air, guest-starred on “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” and was RUSHED TO THE HOSPITAL! more times in the past 20 years than any other resident of L.A. (Dec. 19, 2017)
Anyone younger than 50 is forgiven for not knowing this: James Taylor was a babe. A 6-foot-3 stalk of corn and sensitivity. Flowing chestnut locks. A demure pornstache. A way of picking the strings of a guitar as if he was fingering the valves of your heart. Put some sky-blue denim on him, lean him against a wooden post, tell him to look straight into the camera and good night, you moonlight ladies. (Nov. 30, 2016)
Hillary Clinton in high school
In December 1964, Hillary became co-chairman of an anti-vandalism committee, which allotted $300 to scrub graffiti from the school’s northwest wall. “A student need not take part in the actual destruction to encourage it,” the 17-year-old Hillary told the school paper at the time. (Oct. 17, 2016)
Bob is so considerate of all angles, so careful with every word, that he’d come across as calculating if he weren’t also blunt and talkative. A one-hour brunch with him takes two hours. He chats with the vigor of someone who is put in storage between each Olympiad with no one to talk to about sports and life. He orders an omelette with tomatoes, spinach and a little bit of mozzarella, and then salts the hell out of it. In person, there’s more Long Island in his voice. He is short. His teeth are as orderly as his sentences. (Aug. 4, 2016)
Her book-party dress is half-white and half-black. Her heels are shiny and pointed and black. Her teeth are shiny and perfect and white. Her hair is a black-bronze frizz. She knows she could go “stealth,” and fly under the radar in a society attuned to any deviation from the norm. But she has chosen to be a public champion — with all the attendant scrutiny and frustration — for trans women who can't leave their homes as themselves for fear of violence, who are fighting battles over such fundamentals as bathrooms and education and employment and poverty. (Feb. 13, 2014)
Robert M. Gates is a crier. He is also an expert at restraining himself.
The war is fought in the throat, and lost in the eyes.
He clears his throat as if it will hitch his composure back into compliance. His eyes, however, water and redden. It’s clear what will happen if he blinks. (Jan. 12, 2014)
There have been only a handful of mayors of the District of Columbia, and all but one of them have remained rooted to their city after leaving office. Walter E. Washington, the first, became a partner in the D.C. office of a New York law firm. Sharon Pratt Kelly, the third, and Anthony Williams, the fifth, became and remain local consultants. Marion Barry, the second, later became the fourth and is the city councilman for Ward 8 through at least 2017, perhaps for eternity.
Last month Adrian Fenty, the sixth mayor of Washington, severed his last business tie with the city. … His new constituents — his new employer’s clients, that is — are Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Amazon. (Oct. 22, 2013)
The first Saudi feature film is directed by a woman and features a female character who subverts the religious patriarchy for her own betterment — is it one small step for a woman, one giant leap for womankind? (Sept. 19, 2013)
Roger Ebert (1942-2013)
The first writing I did for newspapers was film criticism, and Ebert’s annual compendia of starred reviews were my inspiration. During high school I tacked above my desk one of his enduring quotations: “A movie is not what it is about but how it is about it.” The simple, elegant authority of this maxim transfixed and guided me, not least because one might substitute “story” — or anything else really — for “movie.” It guides how I write today, about anything. The smallest, most insignificant subject can make for a great story if you inquire with verve and execute with care. By mastering the parameters of a medium and rendering his judgment and appreciation into words, Ebert taught me that. A writer must be both skeptical and big-hearted, intractable on some matters and flexible on others. Ebert taught me that too. (April 5, 2013)
…there are Americans who want to teeter on the abyss, cackling with glee at the terrible absurdity of life, as they fight off a fitful sleep. These Americans watch Dave. Dave’s the guy next to us on the edge, howling into the void. The show is what keeps him on the edge instead of jumping off it. The show is life. (Nov. 30, 2012)
In the flesh, she does not have an aura. She’s not lit from within. Heads do not snap in her direction when she walks through a hotel lobby in a baggy maxi-dress and brown calf-high boots, flanked by her dutiful makeup artist of 35 years and her imperious publicist — the few celebrity trappings of a woman who stubbornly considers herself a working actor, and nothing more. (Dec. 2, 2011)
