It’s one of the most iconic images of America’s greatest city: Edward Hopper’s moody, evocative ode to the City That Never Sleeps: “Nighthawks.” But did the lobster-shift diner shown in Hopper’s most famous painting ever exist?

That’s the subject of a terrific Op-Ed in today’s New York Times by Jeremiah Moss, “Nighthawks State of Mind.”

IN 1941, Edward Hopper began what would become his most recognizable work, one that has become an emblem of New York City. “‘Nighthawks,’” Hopper said in an interview later, “was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet.” The location was pinpointed by a Hopper expert, Gail Levin, as the “empty triangular lot” where Greenwich meets 11th Street and Seventh Avenue, otherwise known as Mulry Square. This has become accepted city folklore. Greenwich Village tour guides point to the lot, now owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and tell visitors that Hopper’s diner stood there. But did it?

It’s a question writers, especially historians and writers of historical fiction about New York, often ask themselves. Often, our imaginations are fired by just such a thing as “Nighthawks,” by a glimpse into the souls of the denizens of the demi-monde: the couple, the man looking sharp in his undoffed fedora (which means he’s either married to the woman next to him or has no respect for her) as he speaks with the counterman; the woman looking indifferently at her nails; and the other guy, minding his own business, and glancing down either at his chow or perhaps the bulldog edition of one of New York’s many newspapers back then. Of such scenes are stories born. (more…)

Sometimes the best examples of the New York Times’s increasingly delusional, anti-rational, anti-American and, let’s face it, anti-human-nature mindset are to be found not on the front page, where their slavish adoration of the Obama Administration continues apace, if somewhat diminished, but in the feature pages. There, their crackpot social theories and their chic cultural Marxism are given free rein to inject their slow-acting poison into the bloodstream of the body politic, with what serious consequences we can now all see after more than four decades of this nonsense. Which is why this piece, innocuously published in the Fashion & Style section, is so important.

If you want to encounter the smiling face of evil, read on:

A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding

After all, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood “best friend” has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture — not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults.

But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?

You read that right: the Times has just declared war on best friends. By now, nothing  that emerges from that seething pile of maleficent animosity toward every decent thing should surprise us, but this is a new low, even for the paper that publishes Frank Rich. And it gets worse: (more…)

The President’s recent commencement address to Hampton University students in Virginia counseled the young minds about the dangers of being bombarded by too much information, but who knew that Joe Lieberman was listening when the President said:

Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment. All of this is not only putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.

The President also schooled the kids on how difficult it is to sift through all of the information on the web.  Perhaps he thinks the government should help us by winnowing out some of the inconsequential information?

All of that mind-boggling information and the new pressures on our country and our democracy must have triggered a response in this “independent senator” from Connecticut (who caucuses with the Democrats of course, just like the other “independent senator,” Bernie Sanders of Vermont), as Joe Lieberman has offered legislation that he claims will “protect” America during an emergency by giving the President power to shut down the Internet. (more…)

Did we just hear Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal try to blame local journalists for his ‘misspoken’ words about his Vietnam war record? When Blumenthal was asked at Tuesday’s press conference why he didn’t correct published accounts of his Vietnam service, he said:

There were a few articles, not many. I am responsible for my own statements….I can’t be responsible for all the articles, I may not even have seen them. ….sometimes journalists do make mistakes.

Cr: Chion Wolf

Really?  Sure, journalists get quotes and background wrong from time to time but civil servants, who are in the public eye like Blumenthal, often call right away to demand a correction. In fact, that’s just what our A.G.’s press staff usually did with me – even when I wrote the quotes exactlyas he said them during phone interviews. Case in point: (more…)

As a proud former staffer of Time Magazine, where I spent 16 mostly terrific years working with some of the finest writers and journalists who ever graced the business — you’re not going to get any snark from me about Time at the end of its glory years in the 1980s under the supervision of Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry Grunwald and the magazine’s great managing editor, Ray Cave — I read the following story with a touch of sadness:

The Washington Post Co. is putting Newsweek up for sale in hopes that another owner can figure out how to stem losses at the 77-year-old weekly magazine.

The publishing industry has been struggling as businesses cut back on ad budgets during the recession. But Newsweek, along with Time magazine and U.S. News & World Report, faces a particular challenge finding a relevant niche in the age of up-to-the-second online news. Once handy digests of the week’s events, they have been assailed by competitors on the Web that pump out a constant stream of news and commentary.

Despite staff cuts, Newsweek has remained a drag on its parent company, which is also struggling with ad declines at its namesake newspaper.

Translation: Newsweek is pretty much dead, and now the only question is who’s going to rouge the corpse for a few more years, if anybody, to keep its collection of Morning Joe talking heads with at least the fig leaf of meaningful employment before the final axe falls.

In the New York Times, David Carr has some thoughts: (more…)

Next we’ll hear that James O’Keefe attended a dinner party honoring Apartheid South Africa’s former president, P. W. Botha. If so, and the accusation verified, O’Keefe’s “insensitivity” to human (and civil) rights would barely register against that of Max Blumenthal’s boss at The Daily Beast, Tina Brown.

I’ll report. Y’all decide:

“N**ger!” taunted my jailers between tortures,” reported the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner about his suffering. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!”  laughed my torturers. For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell. That’s four feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.

I do not refer to Nelson Mandela. No, the prisoner was a black Cuban named Eusebio Peñalver, whose incarceration and torture at the hands of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s Stalinist regime stretched to 29 years, surpassing Nelson Mandela’s record in time behind bars and probably doubling the horrors suffered by Mandela during this period.

“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and booze, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent,” wrote Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his diaries.  When during a 1959 press conference a Cuban black asked Guevara, “what his Revolution would do for blacks?” Che sneered: “we’ll do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean: nothing!” (more…)