In the relatively quiet first half of 2000:
•January saw the peak of the dot-com-era stock market — and within weeks Wall Street saw trading shut down early by an impromptu concert by leftist band Rage Against the Machine and disrupted weeks later by a non-fatal explosive blast that injured several people.
•Meanwhile, al Qaeda members had [...]
I visited India in late November/early December of 1999 with my girlfriend at the time, Indrani Nicodemus. Indrani is herself the child of immigrants, one from Jamaica and one from India. She’s an artist with a soft spot for hippies who was working in a bank at the time of our trip but [...]
What was a typical day like for the common man in the year 1999 A.D.?
My notes suggest it entailed going to a party organized by Daily Show writer Jon Bines and hosted by Love Boat cast member turned Republican congressman Fred “Gopher” Grandy to benefit a comedy troupe, accompanied by bigtime media lawyer Stephanie Abrutyn [...]
Late in the Year of Lewinsky (when the Republicans lost some seats in Congress and Newt Gingrich resigned, the impeaching of Bill Clinton having worked against them), I was reminded that Brown, from which I’d graduated, seemed to produce sexually adventurous people almost as frequently as Washington, DC does.
•Brown alum and fellow New York Press [...]
Ten years ago this week, a grand jury was listening to Linda Tripp’s tapes of her conversations with Monica Lewinsky.
In the present, New York’s governor has just resigned over the revelation he hired prostitutes.
In both cases, I think even someone like me who thinks the law should not control consensual sex can rightly take great [...]
I decided I could no longer even aspire to hipness within a few months after U2’s Las Vegas “Popmart” concert, which took place on April 25, 1997 — getting one of the lowest ratings of any broadcast in the history of the network. I realized I was out of touch with the public, [...]
HEREIN IS EXPLAINED why you may not hear from me about various previously-discussed work or social plans (ones for which no contract, promise, or precise date was made, I mean) — since I really need to focus on writing a book first planned back in 1997 (eleven embarrassing years ago), even if it means much [...]
In late 1996, the John Stossel team at ABC News was preparing the Freeloaders broadcast that I recently mentioned, a look at forms of parasitism large and small, from petty con men and self-confessed lazy homeless men all the way up to corporations receiving subsidies and favors from the government, specifically the Archer Daniels Midland [...]
For me, today is February 15, 2008, and the precise midpoint of my “Month Without God” is marked by hearing a lunchtime speech by Father Richard Neuhaus — no coincidence, some of you are probably smugly thinking — but for you, gentle reader, it’s early 1996, and the Retro-Journal offers you a series [...]
I heard from Andrea and Howard Rich’s employee Chris Whitten that correspondent John Stossel (whose 1989 20/20 segment about deregulation called “Relaxing the Rules” had helped confirm my coalescing libertarian views) had shown up at one of Victor Niederhoffer’s monthly “Junto” political discussion meetings and said he was looking for new staffers to work for [...]
Today, as I write this, it’s February 1, 2008 — and the scheduled first day of this blog’s “Month Without God,” in which I’ll wrestle with some religion-vs.-atheism questions. This month will also see (aside from these Friday Retro-Journal entries) a shift toward more frequent, shorter posts here. But the atheism-religion tension was [...]
National Review sent me to Woodstock ’94 — and my old friend Paul Taylor came along (at his own expense). We weren’t the only Republicans present, since I later learned that my favorite MTV VJ, Kennedy, was wandering around interviewing people in their tents, asking them if they wanted to engage in “free love.”
The [...]
At work, we had a “death pool” in the first half of 1994 — that is, my co-workers and I would be awarded points depending on how many celebrity deaths we correctly predicted that season (with bonus points the younger they were). The points I got for predicting one death were little [...]
The Clintons weren’t all bad, of course. True, they have been a fount of ideas for new government programs — and Hillary, more disturbingly, an advocate of one particularly large program — but Bill, at least, and even his leftist Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, intended in part to use government to make America more [...]
That former friend whose insane father had accidentally blown himself up — along with his fringe “church” — crossed my mind as I watched the Branch Davidians compound burn on TV in April 1993 (from the postmodern safety of the McDonald’s just north of Times Square, on a lunchbreak just [...]