Now I've Heard Everything

We got sad news last week but comedian Gilbert Gottfried had succumbed after a long battle with muscular dystrophy. Funny and controversial, by turns relatable and outrageous, Gilbert Gottfried built a fan base of millions. In 2012 while he was on a whirlwind book tour, I had a few minutes with Gilbert. And I found him to be exactly the kind of guy you would hope that he would be- the kind you'd l...

A few days ago Ketanji Brown Jackson made history as she was confirmed as the first black female supreme Court Justice. But 75 years ago today another African American made history, in a way that may have been nearly as significant. On April 15th. 1947 Jackie Robinson took the field as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the first black man to play in the Major leagues. And Jackie Robinson was no to...

For 11 seasons on the TV series 7th Heaven,  Stephen Collins played The Rev. Eric Camden, a Protestant minister who headed a family of seven. But Collins had a long and impressive acting resume before that, including TV shows and movies.  He was in the first Star Trek movie in 1979. But when I met him in 1994, it was to talk about a novel he had written, a thriller called Eye Contact.&nb...

Male comedians have been dressing as women for comic effect for decades. Think Milton Berle. Think Flip Wilson.  Or Saturday Night Live sketches with Will Farrell or John Goodman.  But perhaps no one has taken it to the level that Tyler Perry did, with his character. Madea. And that is just one reason. Among many, the Tyler Perry is one of the most successful and influential filmmakers o...

For 21 years, from the mid-1950s to the mid '70s, mayor Richard j. Daly ran the city of Chicago. And I mean he ran the city. One member of Daley’s cabinet was a woman named Jane Byrne, who was Chicago’s Commissioner of Consumer Sales. Not long after Mayor Daley’s death in 1976 Byrne left her city job, and ran for mayor herself in 1979. And against the odds, Byrne won.   She became not on...

Back around 1988 or '89, you could hardly go anywhere without seeing a little book written by a former Unitarian minister called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Readers all over the world were struck by the simplicity and elegance and wisdom of that little book. That man was Robert Fulghum, and his book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. Here's how he...

Where has everybody's manners gone? Doesn't anybody have good manners anymore ? For over 40 years, syndicated columnist Judith Martin -- better known as Miss Manners -- has been helping people navigate the often confusing Waters of good manners . In her polite but firm way, Martin answers readers questions about what constitutes good manners and good etiquette in today's world. In 1990, Martin wro...

Today is March 30th, and it was 41 years ago today that a young man tried to kill President Ronald Reagan. And one of the most controversial things that happened that day happened to a man with a long and distinguished military and public service career, general. Alexander Haig. Haig was a graduate of West point m. He served in Korea, served in Vietnam, earned the silver Star and the purple heart....

I'm not sure Frank Warren understood what he was unleashing in January, 2005, when he initiated his PostSecret project . What started as something of a social experiment, encouraging people to send him their innermost secrets on a postcard, turned into something way beyond that. It wasn't long before Frank, a mild-mannered man from suburban Washington, DC started receiving thousands of postcards,...

Human sexuality has been widely studied, researched, and written about over the years, most notably, perhaps, by Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson . In the 1970s and '80s, there was a trilogy of books about sexuality by another researcher that drew widespread praise and criticism.  It was called The Hite Report, by researcher Shere Hite. Much of the controversy centered on the fact that H...

It was around this time in 1961 that a group of five young men formed a singing group called The Elgins. They were good, so good that Berry Gordy signed them to a contract at Motown. Trouble was, there was already a group called The Elgins, so Gordy asked them to find a new name. That's when they became The Temptations. Their leader and founder was baritone Otis Williams. And over the next five de...

Barry Levinson is an Oscar-winning film director and screenwriter. But it also turns out he's a pretty good novelist. The man famous for such films as Diner, Rain Man, and Good Morning, Vietnam wrote a novel in 2003 called Sixty-Six. Like his Baltimore-based movies, Sixty-Six was the storyof young men dealing with momentous changes in their lives and in the society around them.

Some think this is the beginning of another Cold war. Or worse. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has changed the course of world events. Not since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 have Americans paid such close attention to Russia . I was thinking recently that this called to mind and interview I did in 1995, with a Russian woman named Luba Brezhneva. If her last name sounds familiar, it should...

Many authors, maybe even most authors, labor in obscurity for months or years before finally hitting it big with a bestseller . But Patricia Cornwell hit it big with her very first book, Post Mortem in 1990.  And in the three decades since then, she has sold over 100 million books. Her wildly popular mysteries feature a medical examiner named Dr. Kay Scarpetta.  Cornwell based the charac...

In the early 1960s, one of America's most popular teenagers was an actor who wasn't even a teenager . Dwayne Hickman played the clean cut, girl. Crazy, likable lead in the TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. After the series ended, Hickman appeared in several beach movies alongside such figures as Frankie Avalon and Annette Funiciello. Later, he became a television executive, working with CB...

A young British boys fascination with science, and with metals and chemistry in particular, led to him becoming one of the world's foremost neurologists. And the author of best-selling books about science. His name was Oliver Sacks.  He's the author of books such as The Man Who mistook His Wife For a Hat, and The Island of The Color Blind. But he is perhaps best known for his 1973 book Awaken...

The roots of the modern feminist movement can be traced directly back to a single book published nearly 60 years ago. It was called The Feminine Mystique. Its author was a young would-be journalist named Betty Friedan.  It is widely regarded as the spark that lit the fire of the feminist movement. But that was only the beginning for Betty Friedan. Three years later, she co-founded the Nationa...

Tomorrow, March 5th, is the 40th anniversary of the untimely deaf of comedian. John Belushi. Belushi was one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live when it premiered in 1975, and he was the star movies like Animal House and The Blues Brothers. But John Belushi also had a substance abuse problem, and on March 5th, 1982, he died in a Los Angeles hotel room. A woman named Cathy Smith was...

While there have been thousands of books written about the Holocaust, and Nazi Germany, and the horrors of the concentration camps, few have been as powerful in the telling as Art Spiegelman's Maus. Originally a serialized comic strip, Spiegelman published Maus in book form in 1986, with volume 1, and  in 1991 with volume two. And despite its unusual format -- it is nonfiction -- It is the st...

In the mid 20th century, brothers George and ira Gershwin produced many of the songs that have lived in America's heart for decades. With George's melodies and Ira's lyrics, tunes like "Someone to Watch Over Me," "Embraceable You," and "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" have endured for decades. In 1977, a young cabaret singer named Michael Feinstein went to work as Ira Gershwin's personal archivist...

The thing about food is that it's not just fuel for a metabolic process of the human body. It's a social construct, bringing family or friends together in a way few other experiences can. Can. And that's what's at the heart of the writings of Nigell Lawson, the well-known British-born food writer and TV chef. In fact, when I met her in 2004, the book she had just published was called Feast.  ...

Benjamin O. Davis Jr. played a key role in World War II. Not only were his combat accomplishments extraordinary, but his leadership helped shape the United States Air Force for decades to come. Davis was the leader of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. As commander of the 99th Fighter Squadron and 332nd Fighter Group in Europe, Davis demonstrated that African-American pilots were just as skilled as their...

For more than half a century, Frank Deford wrote for Sports Illustrated magazine and for 37 of those years he was also heard regularly on NPR, and seen on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. Six times, Deford was voted national sports writer of the year by the National Sportscasters and Sports Writers Association. But after all those years it took him until 2012 to finally write his memoir, a bo...

As many others of his generation were, former Colorado, senator Gary Hart was inspired to get into politics by John f. Kennedy, and Robert f. Kennedy, and their contemporaries in the 1960s. By 1972, hard had established himself as a rising star in the Democratic party, and ran George McGovern's unsuccessful campaign for president. Two years later, heart ran for US Senate from Colorado and one. He...

Joyce Lynn elders was the eldest child of Arkansas sharecroppers, born in 1933. Through a series of remarkable happenstance, she ended up going to medical school and becoming a pediatrician. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he appointed her to be director of the Arkansas Department of Health.  And when he became president in January 1993, Mr. Clinton chose Dr. Elders to be the U.S....