5 Great Books for Poker Fiends
James McManus has covered poker for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, Card Player, ESPN.com, and The New Yorker. Positively Fifth Street, his memoir of finishing fifth in the World Series of Poker championship event, was a New York Times bestseller and is already considered a classic.
From David Mamet's American Buffalo to Bill Gates' memoir, poker expert James McManus shares five great works where the game plays a major hand. His new book, Cowboys Full, has just been published.
On the Trail With Ken Burns
Rachel Syme is culture editor of The Daily Beast.
The documentarian's new series, The National Parks, debuts tonight on PBS. He tells Rachel Syme about the virtues of big government, and how he feels about being called a socialist.
Presidential Conspiracies
Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.
Obama's "birther" scandal isn't the first wacky theory about a president. From John Adams' royal plot to Mary Lincoln's spy games, Benjamin Sarlin on the nuttiest controversies.
Obama's Confederate Compromise
Judy Pasternak is a Washington-based journalist. She is writing a book, Yellow Dirt: The Betrayal of the Navajos, which recently won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. It will be published by Free Press.
UPDATE: Following a Daily Beast report on whether the president should continue a Confederate Memorial Day wreath tradition, Obama started a new one this morning, honoring African-American soldiers.
Africa's Surprise Success Story
Tony Blair is founder of the Breaking the Climate Deadlock Initiative and was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2007. Visit tonyblairoffice.org.
Writing from Africa, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says Sierra Leone, the once war-torn nation now reinventing itself as a tourist destination, can serve as a model for developing nations struggling to weather the economic storm.
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Jeffrey Koterba is an acclaimed syndicated political cartoonist. Since joining the Omaha World-Herald in 1989, he has been a finalist for Editorial Cartoonist of the Year from the National Cartoonists Society and has placed second in the National Headliner Awards. His work is distributed through King Features Syndicate to 400 newspapers nationwide, and has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post, among others.
Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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