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Joanne Lipman

Joanne Lipman

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Former Editor of Conde Nast Portfolio

BUSINESS
FINANCE
MEDIA

You’ll feel a lot better about the future of diplomacy when you check out Global21online.org. Created and run by Yale students, Global21 oversees The Globalist, a network of international-affairs magazines that has expanded to universities in eight countries including China, Israel, Turkey and South Africa. The far-flung student journalists (full disclosure: including my daughter) gather online to discuss everything from politics (a forum on Afghanistan) to pop culture (“Where were you when Michael Jackson died?”). The conversation is way more civil than what we hear from grownups—a welcome sign for us all.

10:24 pm, Nov 5, 2009
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RJ Cutler

R.J. Cutler

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Director of The September Issue

CULTURE
FILM
POLITICS

Anish Kapoor's exhibition of new sculptures at London's Royal Academy is the Muhammad Ali of museum shows. Loquacious, giddy, explosive, seductive, aggressive and poetic, it is indeed The Greatest. Thrilling audiences of all ages through December 11, this Kapoor is not to be missed.

10:24 pm, Nov 5, 2009
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Joel Whitney

Joel Whitney

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Co-founder of Guernica

ART
POLITICS
PUBLISHING

I like Media Matters for America, although they take everything so literally. When President Obama's team teased Fox News for its imaginative use of facts, commentators repeated ad nauseam Rupert Murdoch's claim that Fox News' ratings went "through the roof." Wasn't it ironic that this light teasing from the White House actually helped Fox News? Along comes Media Matters armed with their Nielsen reports. "In fact, not only did Fox News' overall ratings not soar," writes buzzkill Eric Boehlert on Media Matters' Web site. "Instead, in the two weeks following the initial verbal jousts with the White House, Fox News' total day ratings virtually flatlined." I wish Media Matters would lighten up. I'll keep reading them just to see if they do.

10:59 pm, Nov 4, 2009
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John Lithgow

John Lithgow

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Actor

THEATER
The Secret Scripture book cover

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry. He’s a wonderful Irish novelist but even more well-known as an Irish playwright. It’s an incredibly heartfelt story. You know those Irish—they write. Anybody who takes my recommendation will thank me for it.

10:59 pm, Nov 4, 2009
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Dustin Hoffman

Dustin Hoffman

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Actor

THEATER

I’d recommend Circle Mirror Transformation, which I just saw at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater on 42nd Street. It takes place in an acting class. I come from that world and it was accurate. It’s a wonderful and intimate space with only about 80 seats.

11:07 pm, Nov 3, 2009
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James Carroll

James Carroll

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Boston Globe columnist and Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University

RELIGION

I recommend A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. This doorstop of a book has the lightness of pure oxygen. It begins with an essay (by Toby Lester) about the first map on which the word “America” appears. More than a thousand pages later, the book concludes with prints (by Kara Walker) acknowledging Barack Obama’s election, one of which includes the line, “The new and revised edition of the American narrative.” This exquisite volume, offers something more—a revised edition of the American imagination. Hemingway, Bellow, and Louisa May Alcott are here, but so is bebop, the atom bomb, and Superman. Marcus and Sollors track the progression (not always progress) from the discovery of a place to the invention of an idea to a highly nuanced literature that keeps the place alive and the idea new. This book belongs on everybody’s best table.

11:07 pm, Nov 3, 2009
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Neil Ferguson

Neil Ferguson

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Chef

FOOD

Vinegars are my current obsession in the kitchen; not your common household variety mind you...I’ve been using a great, artisanal honey vinegar from France, with a natural sweetness and a very discreet acidity. I can drink it by the spoonful, and it’s great now that we are getting heavily into our pickling season. Another really interesting one is Blis Solera Elixr sherry vinegar, which has been cask-aged in barrels which originally had whiskey in them, followed by maple syrup followed by the vinegar—it’s off the charts! Very little effort needed with products like these.

7:29 pm, Nov 3, 2009
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Barbie Latza Nadeau

Barbie Latza Nadeau

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Newsweek correspondent, Rome

POLITICS

Forget the hype about French black truffles. If you really want gastronomic ecstasy, start sniffing around for Italian white truffles—truly the diamond of tubers. I highly recommend a truffle holiday as a fab niche travel experience. It is now the height of the white truffle season in Italy, where trained dogs are rooting around the base of oak trees. (Truffle-hunting pigs were replaced years ago since they can’t be trained not to eat the treasures.) White truffles, which are never cooked, are value at around $1,000 a pound, but worth every penny.

But don’t try to make the magic last—white truffles should be consumed within a few days of digging them out of the ground, preferably at a fireside table somewhere in a Tuscan villa near where they were harvested.

11:24 pm, Nov 2, 2009
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Alec Baldwin

Alec Baldwin

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Actor

FILM
TELEVISION

Read Frank Bruni’s book Born Round. It’s a fun book. I liked his ending up doing something he never thought he would do. I feel the same way, like Frank was working in the Rome bureau of The New York Times and he went on to become the food critic of the Times, and I always imagined I was going to be doing something other than what I ended up doing.

11:24 pm, Nov 2, 2009
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Fran Drescher

Fran Drescher

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Actress

POLITICS
TELEVISION
BB - The Beauty Myth

I would really recommend that every woman read Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. It’s a fantastic concept, it says that no matter how high women get on the food chain in the corporate world, because they are women living in a man’s world, they don’t invest their money in the way that men might. Many of them put most of their money on their back and on their face because regardless of how educated they are or how successful they are or how much money they make, their true value in our society is if they look like a million bucks.

10:41 pm, Nov 1, 2009
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