As a result of spending my college days at UCLA, I had a handful of contacts in the Hollywood community when I came back East to live in 1969. When I started becoming familiar with New York publishing in the 1970s, I found myself, on occasion, shopping movie or TV tie-in projects. Armed with a […]
Long ago at the Los Angeles Times Book Review
Although the decline of newspaper book review sections is just a sub-set of the larger sadness of the overall demise of newspapers, I was struck by the recent report of the mighty Los Angeles Times Book Review being stripped down to practically nothing. I haven’t read it for years, but this news made me think about […]
Malcolm Gladwell, please meet John Wooden
The sui generis Malcolm Gladwell wrote a provocative piece in the May 11 New Yorker, “How David Beats Goliath”, that demonstrates that the underdog can often win by adopting an unconventional strategy. The examples were numerous, and included Lawrence of Arabia, but the central point-maker was a girls basketball team. Their coach, an Iranian national […]