When Wall Street Journal writer Jeffrey Zaslow went to Carnegie Mellon University last September to hear a “last lecture” from a professor facing terminal cancer, he wasn’t even sure if it would turn out to be a story for his newspaper column.
Everybody feels like they know Charles Schulz, king of the funnies, after reading his musings for 30 years. Good grief! He’s the artist who brought happiness to so many as the world’s most popular cartoonist. He’s the creator of Snoopy, the incarnation of joy in beagle form and — not incidentally — a visionary of merchandising, who made the Snoopy doghouse sheets on children’s beds a possibility.
“The Snowball”? Kind of a strange title, don’t you think? But in its simplicity it captures the business philosophy of the man who perennially ranks as one of the richest in the world.
“Lord, I was born a ramblin’ man,” goes the Allman Brothers song. “Tryin’ to make a livin’ and doin’ the best I can.” How deeply American is the ramblin’ man, and where would American blues be without him? “I got ramblin’, I got ramblin’ on my mind,” calls out Robert Johnson, and Woody Guthrie responds, “Goin’ down the road feelin’ bad.”
Why were the Beatles such good musicians? How did Bill Gates get so smart? Why do kids with birthdays in the first few months of the year make standout hockey players?
New York Stories: LandmarkWriting From Four Decades ofNew York Magazineedited by SteveFishman, John Homans, and AdamMoss, foreword by Tom Wolfe (RandomHouse, 570 pages, $17 paper). As media stories go, it caused barely a blip on the radar screen a week ago: food critic (and X-rated novelist and memoirist) Gael Greene’s dismissal from New York Magazine. One discovers, though, on the fly from the editor’s introduction to this great anthology (in which we find her 1970 piece “How Not to Be Humiliated in Smart Restaurants”) that she’d been “the only writer who has appeared regularly” from the beginning of New York Magazine to its present day.
For those whose wallets are jammed with paint chips and who scour paint fan decks before they fall asleep, a new pocket-size handbook will be a welcome resource.
