Sam Kashner

Oct 18, 2024 | airmail.news | Sam Kashner

The storm is up, and all is on the hazard. —William ShakespeareA freakish storm out of nowhere. An “unsinkable” super-yacht that ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Seven dead, including England’s first tech billionaire, 59-year-old Mike Lynch, known as the British Bill Gates, who had, just two months earlier, been exonerated for fraud, concluding a 12-year legal battle.

Sep 14, 2024 | airmail.news | Sam Kashner

In his dialogue “The Critic as Artist,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “It is always Judas who writes the biography.” What impressed me about the actor Eric Roberts, whose memoir, Runaway Train, comes out this week, was how willing he was to betray himself. Eric and I worked together on the book throughout the dark days of the pandemic. Whenever our attention would drift, we’d keep ourselves in the game by conjuring up possible titles.

Aug 2, 2024 | airmail.news | Sam Kashner

No sooner had J. D. Vance been chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate and anointed as the future of MAGA that attention turned to his phenomenally successful, best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, first published in 2016 and rarely straying from Amazon’s list of best-sellers. For many, it was the title that first drew us in: a poet’s title, a writer’s title.

Jun 28, 2024 | airmail.news | Sam Kashner

“Goodbye, sweet hat.”—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in WonderlandThere once was a time when you never saw a man on the street without a hat. To be hatless was to be half dressed—and it had to be the right hat. But what was the right hat? Well, you couldn’t go wrong with a Borsalino fedora. “The 40s was a great era for big beautiful Borsalinos on big, beautiful men,” the costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis said in the 2015 documentary Borsalino City.

Jun 21, 2024 | airmail.news | Sam Kashner

All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians by Phil Elwood When I received my advance copy of Phil Elwood’s new book, All the Worst Humans, the first thing I did was look for my name in the index. Happily, I was not included. The subtitle of his book, “How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians,” couldn’t be timelier, as our news gets spun, one way or another, faster than atoms in an Iranian cyclotron.