Dear Dexter

I is for Isaac

I don’t think I like Isaac Mizrahi very much. This is a sad thing for me because there was a time when I thought that I liked him very much (insofar as you can like someone you only know through the television and an occasional magazine profile). He was funny....

J is for Jenny from the Block

I have a number of recurring nightmares, most of which are the typical ones — the teeth falling out dream, the dream where I’m in college and it’s the end of the semester and I suddenly realize that I have a final for a class that I’ve...

In Defense of K is for K-Fed

Consider this: Kevin Federline is judged harshly because he’s gotten famous not for anything he’s accomplished but because of different reasons all together. His soon-to-be wife, too, is judged harshly because her fame, though not wholly unearned, seems...

L is for Luther, L is for Love

I wouldn’t have been so direct about this last year, because I’m a coward, but now that he’s dead (and you can’t be sued by a dead person), I’ll just say it: Luther Vandross was gay. Or, as The New York Times put it in their obituary,...

M is for Alex P. Keaton

I knew there was a reason I liked Michael J. Fox (aside, that is, from his winning smile, his ability to go back in time to turn his loser parents into obnoxious yuppies, and that time when I was trying to cut back on my fossil fuel consumption when he loaned me his...

N is for Neve Campbell

Exhibit N in my continuing investigation of the repressed sexuality of American cinema is Neve Campbell, one of the more naturally sensual actresses of her generation and also, as we remember from her teasing moments of near-nudity in Scream and Wild Things, one of...

O is for Oprah

There’s really only one interesting question when it comes to Oprah Winfrey, whose record of accomplishment is so extraordinary and whose past is so morally unblemished that even Kitty Kelley, perhaps our nation’s most resourceful scandal-mongering...

P is for Sean (P)(.)(uff)(d)(a/i)(dd)(y) Combs

I met Puffy once, briefly, in the V.I.P room of a club in Ibiza. We were both drenched in the hallucinogenic purple foam with which the club’s spirit team had just hosed down the partying masses. I was—to be Frank—tripping my balls off, so when I say...

Q is for Le Q

It’s indicative of the surprising paucity of our idea of Quincy Jones that the definitive profile of him is the rather short review of his autobiography, “Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones,” that Kelefa Sanneh published in the New Yorker in 2001....

P is for Paris: Update

Many moons ago, I wrote a short post in which I explained why my dominant reaction regarding Paris Hilton had transmogrified from contempt to pity. The tipping point came when the contents of a storage locker she’d failed tokeep up the payments on was bought and...

R is for Regis

In the second paragraph of her 2000 New Yorker profile of Regis Philbin, Elizabeth Kolbert has a wonderfully casual insight that, unfortunately but not surprisingly, the rest of the 5,500 word essay fails to adequately deepen. She writes: Philbin has made a career of...

Matt Zoller Seitz on Harry Potter movie

Matt Zoller Seitz, my favorite working film critic (I say that as if there’s a whole legion of non-working critics who I like better, when in truth there’s really just Pauline Kael, who, being dead and all, certainly isn’t working anymore) has a nice...

Wolcott on Denby on Knocked Up

James Wolcott has a nice riff off of David Denby’s essay in the recent New Yorker. Though I’m not a huge Denby fan, in general, I think everyone’s being a bit harsh on the essay, which was actually pretty good. Still, I always enjoy Wolcott taking...

C is for Cruise, Tom

Tom Carson, one of my favorite working all-purpose, culturally omnivorous, pound-for-pound critics, wrote a wonderfulicious essay on Tom Cruise a few years that you just have to read (okay, you don’t have to read it, but if you don’t, you’ll forever...