Mark Singer

His frame-by-frame vivisections of a given pitcher’s or hitter’s mechanics taught me how to see the game in its limitless particulars.

Raising a glass to the New Yorker legend—born five years before the founding of this magazine, and a contributor for the past seventy-six—as he celebrates a milestone birthday.

Before Milch went to work in Hollywood, he taught writing at Yale while collaborating on a two-volume anthology of American literature with the critics Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, who had been a mentor to Milch when he was an undergraduate there, in the mid-sixties. Reading Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, James, and Faulkner in such depth helped Milch create complex television characters whose voices were each marked by singular diction. His dialogue was suffused wit…

Working with his old professor Martha Nussbaum, the writer, filmmaker, and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” star really did his homework.

As the vote approached, McCain elected not to be a company man. The institution that he had belonged to and loved had become intolerable.

At Symphony Space, self-professed armchair liberals gather for a reaffirmation of their political values, which amounted to a rhetorical neck massage.

His words increasingly signify his confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.

I still wince at his dead-on appraisal of my travel piece: “You’ll notice that I stopped marking this halfway through. What you’ve written is interesting only to you.”

Mark Singer hangs out near the courthouse with the “Doonesbury” cartoonist, who has just wrapped Season 2 of “Alpha House.”

Despite the danger, James Foley went to Syria to bear witness and give others a voice.