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      Trump Truth Social app will be fully operational by end of March, Nunes says

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      Trump Truth Social app will be fully operational by end of March, Nunes saysApple App Store lists rightwing Twitter alternative but ex-congressman tapped to lead company indicates slow rollout Donald Trump’s rightwing riposte to Twitter – his new social media app Truth Social – is supposed to launch on Monday. But the rollout of what the former president hopes will be the start of a new media empire continues to be shrouded in confusion and secrecy.Tim Scott, only Black Senate Republican, hints he could be Trump running mateRead moreDevin Nunes, the former Republican congressman and Trump loyalist who heads Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), told Fox News on Sunday Truth Social would make its debut on the Apple App Store this week. The app is featured on the store, with the notice “Expected Feb 21”.But the launch has been beset with delays. On the Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures, Nunes indicated that a full service was still weeks away.“Our goal is, I think we’re going to hit it, I think by the end of March we’re going to be fully operational at least within the United States,” he said.Truth Social is Trump’s answer to having been permanently thrown off Twitter after the company ruled that the then president’s tweets leading up to the US Capitol attack on January 6 2021 violated its policy against glorification of violence. The decision cut Trump off from direct contact with almost 90m followers.Facebook has also suspended Trump for comments inciting violence at the Capitol, but has left open the possibility of a return.Glimpses of what Truth Social will look like have been given in the past few days, prompting the observation that it looks remarkably similar to Twitter. Instead of blue ticks to denote verified accounts, it will use red ticks.Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr, tweeted a screenshot of his father’s first post on Truth Social, which said: “Get ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!”The remark was much less memorable than the fact that the Truth Social screenshot and Donald Jr’s actual tweet looked virtually identical.Truth Social describes itself as a “big tent” social media platform “that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology”.But given the initial teething problems of the launch, the former president could find it difficult to fill the hole in his public profile left by his banishment from established social media.Twitter records more than 200 million daily active users and Facebook almost 2 billion. By contrast Gettr, a social media outlet set up by Jason Miller, a former Trump adviser, claims 4 million users on average per month.Gettr is part of a growing number of social media start-ups vying to take on tech giants they accuse of censoring rightwing ideology. Gettr, Parler and Gab all present as rightwing alternatives to Twitter.Rumble is a video platform that sets itself up as conservative competition to YouTube. The company has said it will be providing video on the Truth Social app.The proliferation of rightwing social media sites, despite their relatively small reach compared with Silicon Valley giants, is prompting concern about their political impact.Observers have questioned whether the start-ups, which present themselves as forums for open untrammeled discussion, will act as breeding grounds for misinformation on subjects such as vaccinations, the climate crisis and election integrity.Truth Social has promised to ensure that its contents is “family friendly” and has reportedly entered a partnership with a San Francisco company, Hive, which will moderate posts using cloud-based artificial intelligence.Even the new app’s name is likely to be controversial, given Trump’s legendary struggles with veracity. The Washington Post calculated that in the four years of his presidency, the man now behind Truth Social made 30,573 false or misleading claims.TopicsDonald TrumpSocial mediaDigital mediaInternetUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      PJ O’Rourke obituary

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      PJ O’Rourke obituaryConservative American humorist, political satirist and writer who took aim at his own generation – the baby boomers The American humorist PJ O’Rourke, who has died aged 74 of lung cancer, was a writer of sharp wit that ranged from dry to lusciously over the top, but was always leavened by a measure of self deprecation that stopped it from being cruel or harsh. In the political satire that dominated his later writing, he became that rarest of things, a funny conservative.His political writing was based on his early change of tack from 1960s lefty to what he could call the libertarian right, libertarian being the escape hatch for those trapped within the Republican party. His changing stance mirrored the course of his career, from the satire of the National Lampoon and hipness of Rolling Stone to more earnest outlets such as the Atlantic Monthly and the rightwing Cato Institute.He had been instrumental in making the Atlantic Monthly Press a success; its editor Morgan Entrekin called him “one of the major voices of his generation”.The recurrent theme in his writing was his place in his generation – the baby boomers. “My generation spoiled everything for you,” he told younger readers. “It has always been the prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grownups. But my generation exhausted the earth’s resources of the weird … all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologise.”He was born in Toledo, Ohio, to Delfine (nee Loy), a housewife and later a school administrator, and Clifford O’Rourke, a car salesman. He went to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio – “the one where you can’t major in windsurfing” – and took a master’s in English (1970) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he began writing for a local underground paper, Harry, and the Rip-Off Review of Western Culture, which got him a gig with the National Lampoon magazine in 1973.He made his mark quickly, working on the stage show Lemmings, which made stars of John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest, and co-writing with the Lampoon founder Doug Kenney The National Lampoon High School Yearbook, based on a piece by Michael O’Donoghue. There was a strong Irish-American wise-guys at the back of the class vibe at the Lampoon.Kenney also hailed from Ohio, but had attended a private school; the record of the fictional class of 1964 at a high school in Dacron (the name a cross between Ohio cities Dayton and Akron, but also a popular brand of cheap polyester cloth) was based squarely on O’Rourke’s days at Toledo’s DeVilbiss high. The yearbook itself was purportedly the property of one Larry Kroger, who would reappear in 1978 as the naive protagonist of the film National Lampoon’s Animal House.By the time Animal House became a hit, O’Rourke was the editor-in-chief of the Lampoon, charged with “the Squaresville task of making the magazine show a profit”. In the 2018 biopic of Kenney, A Futile and Stupid Gesture, O’Rourke is portrayed in just that light – but his empathy with squares was crucial to the yearbook’s success.Now he found himself out of place in a “clubby and snitty” atmosphere which remained as the creative core of the Lampoon moved on to Hollywood and Saturday Night Live. He turned the magazine, according to one critic, into “comedy you can jack off to”.In 1981 he went freelance, writing for the top-payers such as Vanity Fair and Playboy. His key Lampoon essay “How To Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”, was reprinted in his first book, Republican Party Reptile (1987), a homage to Hunter Thompson, the chief exponent of gonzo journalism, that saw him appointed “foreign desk chief” at Rolling Stone, the ultimate hip boomer journal.His writing moved from social satire to politics and he reported from war zones, where his knack for satirising the absurd found its true metier. His 1988 collection, Holidays in Hell, is perhaps the best of his 20 books. He became a celebrity, without slowing down in the least, but as I can attest after surviving a London evening with him and my then ABC television colleague Charles Glass, O’Rourke was one of those rare people who was nicer in private, going beyond his public affability, which often surprised those expecting combative wit.In 1991 O’Rourke interviewed Bill Clinton, along with his Rolling Stone colleagues Thompson and William Greider, and its publisher, Jann Wenner. He quickly slid Clinton into identity politics via the Lampoon yearbook template. Clinton’s favourite Beatle was Paul McCartney: Clinton was the “band geek” who paid attention in class.For a short time O’Rourke held down the right side of Point/Counterpoint on CBS’s flagship news show 60 Minutes, opposite the equally funny and acerbic Molly Ivins, but they were too brilliant a mix to last on network TV. As he once wrote, “no humorist is under any obligation to provide answers”.That voice could lose its affability when writing for the Cato Institute, but the new millennium presented new problems, which his work for the Atlantic laid out clearly. A 2004 essay on listening to the radio host Rush Limbaugh shouting to his echo chamber of “ditto heads” led him to search for a leftwing equivalent, but when he could not find one he wound up blaming the entire media landscape. He complained in another essay you could not tell the “liberals who once led Vietnam protests in clown pants from the car ads”, ironically putting his young self and his father into the same boat.His libertarian conservatism reached its apotheosis with Donald Trump’s taking over the Republican party, reflected in his 2016 book of election coverage How the Hell Did This Happen? He endorsed Hillary Clinton, because “she’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters”. Although he claimed in 1992 he had “given up” the 60s, Trump was exactly the sort of spoiled preppy boomer O’Rourke could despise. But he might have looked back to his childhood, and Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo. It was Pogo who said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”In 1990 O’Rourke married Amy Lumet, daughter of the film director Sidney and granddaughter of the entertainer Lena Horne.They divorced three years later, and in 1995 he married Tina Mallon. She and their children, Olivia, Clifford and Elizabeth, survive him.TopicsMediaUS politicsComedyMagazinesUS televisionobituariesReuse this content More

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      Tucker Carlson viewers calling me to say US should back Russia, Democrat says

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      Tucker Carlson viewers calling me to say US should back Russia, Democrat saysNew Jersey congressman says viewers are calling to express distress that Biden is ‘not siding with Russia’ in Ukraine crisis A congressman from New Jersey has disclosed that he is receiving calls from viewers of Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News show, expressing distress at the Biden administration’s backing of Ukraine in the tense military stand-off with Russia.UK warns of ‘unprecedented sanctions’ against Russia as Biden says west is united on UkraineRead moreDemocratic representative Tom Malinowski said in a tweet his office was fielding calls from Carlson viewers “upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine”.The callers, he said, “want me to support Russia’s ‘reasonable’ positions”.News of the effect of Carlson’s broadcasts doubting support for Ukraine came as the Pentagon placed 8,500 troops on high alert ready to deploy to Europe, amid fears that a Russian invasion could be imminent.Nato allies have been struggling to project unity in opposition to the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s belligerent amassing of more than 100,000 troops on the Ukraine border.Carlson, the top-rated host on Rupert Murdoch’s rightwing news channel, has been using his nightly bully pulpit to question the merits of Washington’s backing through Nato of Ukraine in the face of Putin’s expansionist threat.On Monday night, his show screened an image of the White House with the words “War Machine” stamped over it.The host accused “neocons” in the Biden administration of “betraying our country’s interests” and said a massive lobbying campaign by Ukrainian politicians and American defense contractors was behind the strategy.Ukraine was “strategically irrelevant” to the US, Carlson said.In his analysis of the crisis Carlson made no mention of Putin or his ambition to push back Nato from eastern and central Europe, nor of Ukraine’s standing as a sovereign nation which achieved independence 30 years ago.Ukraine is a country bigger in land mass than France, with a similar population to Spain, now facing an unprovoked invasion from the neighbouring power.Carlson has used his show to express contentious views on Europe before. For a week in August, he relocated Tucker Carlson Tonight to Budapest, from where he broadcast glowing reports on the authoritarian leadership of Viktor Orbán.This week he indicated that he plans to return to Hungary soon for more broadcasts praising the government’s tough stance on immigration.Speaking to the Hill, Malinowski said: “People get their opinions by watching the news, that’s nothing new. What is new is we have at least one talkshow host with a huge captive audience that is not exposed to any counter-programming elsewhere.“I find that very concerning.”TopicsRussiaUS politicsEuropeUkraineRepublicansFox NewsUS television industrynewsReuse this content More

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      Joe Biden appears to mock Fox News reporter in hot mic moment – video

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      Joe Biden has been caught on a hot mic apparently referring to a Fox News reporter as a ‘stupid son of a bitch’. As journalists left a meeting, the Fox News White House reporter Peter Doocy asked whether Biden thought inflation was a political liability ahead of the midterms. ‘No, it’s a great asset – more inflation,’ Biden appeared to respond sarcastically over a din of reporters shouting questions, apparently not realizing his microphone was still on. ‘What a stupid son of a bitch,’ he added

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      Joe Biden appears to insult Fox News reporter over inflation question

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      Joe Biden appears to insult Fox News reporter over inflation questionPresident caught on mic seemingly swearing at Peter Doocy as journalists left a news conference00:24Joe Biden was caught on a hot mic appearing to insult the Fox News journalist Peter Doocy, seemingly calling him a “stupid son of a bitch” after Doocy posed a question about US inflation.Biden calls Peter Doocy a “stupid son of a bitch” Appeared to forget the hot mic pic.twitter.com/FtelbODMO0— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) January 24, 2022
      “Do you think inflation is a political liability in the midterms?” the reporter asked the president as journalists were leaving the room at the end of an event at the White House on Monday.Biden responded: “No, it’s a great asset – more inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch.”The mic was right in front of Biden, but it appeared as if he were making the remark to himself or that he might have thought the mic had been turned off.The remark came at the end of a White House Competition Council meeting where officials provided an update on efforts to combat inflation, which recently hit 7%. Biden, who was also fielding questions about the growing crisis in Ukraine, had said he only wanted to address questions on the topic of the council, which Doocy appeared to be covering in his inquiry. The White House has said this month that inflation will only be a temporary problem, but some Democrats have worried about the potential for longer-term political consequences.‘Enemy of the people’: Trump’s war on the media is a page from Nixon’s playbookRead moreThe clip of Biden’s remark quickly went viral on social media, with some pointing out that Biden days earlier had muttered, “What a stupid question,” in response to another Fox News reporter’s question about Russia. Doocy went live on Fox News soon after and joked about the insult, saying: “Nobody has factchecked him yet.”Last year, Biden apologized to a CNN reporter after snapping at one of her questions. As vice-president, Biden got caught on a hot mic telling Barack Obama, “This is a big fucking deal!” after he signed healthcare legislation.Despite Monday’s gaffe, Biden’s first year in office has marked a return to civility after a tumultuous four years under Donald Trump, who labelled the media the “enemy of the American people”. Biden has described journalists as “indispensable” to democracy, although press access to him has been limited. The president held fewer than 10 formal news conferences during his first year, far less than Trump or Obama. His press conference last week, however, was longer than any given by either predecessor.TopicsJoe BidenFox NewsTV newsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Al Jazeera winds down Rightly, its conservative US media project – report

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      Al Jazeera winds down Rightly, its conservative US media project – reportThe platform, launched in a surprise decision last year, met with backlash from staff who feared it would tarnish brand Al Jazeera, the Qatar-funded media organization, has reportedly stopped creating content for its new conservative digital project in the US, Rightly.Four sources confirmed the news to Axios, which was the first to report it on Tuesday. In December, the company ended its show on the platform, which was being overseen by its editor-in-chief, Scott Norvell, a Fox News veteran.Al Jazeera launched Rightly last year to “provide fresh voices that are too often left out of the mainstream media a space to engage and debate the issues that matter most to them”, according to a statement released at the time.The surprise decision to launch such a project was met with objections from numerous Al Jazeera staff members, with many saying that its launch would “irreparably tarnish the network’s brand and work”.Al Jazeera staff say rightwing platform will ‘irreparably tarnish’ brandRead moreIn an open letter to Al Jazeera management, staff members, including executive producers, presenters and correspondents wrote: “Media in the US is already polarised and the introduction of Rightly is not a solution but rather a deepening of the problem.“Those of us who work in the United States already face tremendous challenges, and our jobs will only be made more difficult now that we will be associated with promoting a political ideology,” the letter added.“This isn’t about politics, left or right, or diversity of perspectives … This is about journalism and continuing the network’s moral mission of uplifting marginalized voices, communities and stories. Rightly is a betrayal of that mission.”Last fall, the Department of Justice ordered AJ+, a US-based digital news network owned by Al Jazeera, to register as a foreign agent. In a letter sent to Al Jazeera, the DOJ said that the network, which produces short videos for social media, engaged in “political activities” on behalf of the Qatari government and thus needed to be subject to the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Al Jazeera said AJ+ was independent and should not need to register.Axios reported that Rightly staff members who worked on the show were given little warning that it would wind down. One staff member who worked on the show said it was explained as “a budgetary decision”.Brad Polumbo, a policy correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education, who worked on Rightly, confirmed to Axios that it had closed. “I had a great experience there,” he said, adding: “It’s disappointing that it was cut short but we’ll still have that work we did as part of our portfolio and to be proud of going forward.”Michael Weaver, Al Jazeera’s senior vice-president of business and development and growth, said that the company was still evaluating the Rightly brand. “We’re constantly evaluating everything we put on the air,” he said, without specifying what products might be produced in the future from the brand.TopicsAl JazeeraUS politicsUS press and publishingnewsReuse this content More

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      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate world

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      Chasing History review: Carl Bernstein’s pre-Watergate worldBefore he helped bring down Richard Nixon, the reporter grew up in a school of hard knocks. His memoir is a treasure Few reporters are synonymous with their craft. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post is one, his former partner, Carl Bernstein, another. Together, they broke open the Watergate scandal, helped send a president’s minions to prison and made Richard Nixon the only man to resign the office. On the big screen, Robert Redford played Woodward. Bernstein got Dustin Hoffman.These days, Bernstein is a CNN analyst and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Chasing History, his sixth book, is a warm and inviting read.Now 77, he writes with the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of self-imposed deadlines. His prose is dry and reflective even as it draws in the reader. This is his look back and valedictory, with a fitting subtitle: “A Kid in the Newsroom.”He describes life before the Post, in pages marked with politics – and haberdashery.“I needed a suit.” So the book begins. Shortly thereafter: “My mother and father, in the early 1950s, had taken me with them to join the sit-ins at Woodward & Lothrop to desegregate its tea room.”“Woodies”, a department store, closed in 1995. In the 50s, rather than testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, Bernstein’s mother invoked her right against self-incrimination. His father suffered for past membership in the Communist party. The FBI of J Edgar Hoover was an unwelcome presence in the Bernsteins’ lives.Still in high school, Bernstein worked as a part-time copy boy for the Washington Star. “Now that I’d covered the inauguration of JFK, Mr Adelman’s chemistry class interested me even less,” he confesses.He barely scraped out of high school, flunked out of the University of Maryland and lost his deferment from the Vietnam draft. He found a spot in a national guard unit, removing the possibility of deployment and combat. Chasing History also includes a copy of Bernstein’s college transcript, which advertises a sea of Fs and the capitalized notation: “ACADEMICALLY DISMISSED 1-27-65.”On the other hand, before he was old enough to vote, Bernstein had covered or reported more than most journalists do in a lifetime. The 1960 presidential election, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, desegregation and Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. All were part of his remit.The integration of DC’s barber shops, a race-fueled brawl at a high school football game, the death of a newspaper vendor. In a nation in upheaval, all captured Bernstein’s attention.He is one of the last of his breed, a national reporter without a degree. Chasing History reminds us that by the mid-1960s, newsrooms were no longer dominated by working-class inflections. Carbon paper, hot lead typesetting, ink-stained fingers and smocks would also give way, to computers and digitization.The Ivy League emerged as a training ground of choice. Television would outpace print. Rough edges would be smoothed and polished, a premium placed on facts. Hard-knocks, not so much.“A big generational change was occurring in the journalism trade,” Bernstein writes. “Editors wanted college graduates now. My view was that you might be better prepared by graduating from horticultural school than from Yale or Princeton.”The kicker: “At least that way you could write the gardening column.”Emphasis on the word “might”, though. Woodward went to Yale. To this day, they count each other as friends.Chasing History is more about gratitude than grievance. For 10 pages, Bernstein recalls the names of his “young friends”, their “remarkable paths”, his intersection with those who would emerge as “historical footnotes” and his “teachers and mentors”.Lance Morrow, formerly of Time and the Wall Street Journal, makes it on to the dedication page. They were housemates and worked at the Star. Later, their careers flourished. Morrow, according to Bernstein, “occupies a unique place in the journalism of our time” and has been an “incomparable joy” in the author’s life.Likewise, Ben Stein – and his appearance as an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in 1986 – earns more than a passing shoutout. The fact Stein and his father served in the Nixon administration did not dent Bernstein’s fondness. They grew up nextdoor to each other in the DC suburbs. In junior high, the boys founded a “lox-and-bagel/Sunday New York Times delivery service”. The two see each other yearly.Bernstein also pays his respects to David Broder, the late dean of the political press corps. On 23 November 1962, as a copy boy, Bernstein took dictation from Broder, who was in Dallas that fateful Friday afternoon. Years later, Broder provided a useful tip that helped shape the path and coverage of “Woodstein’s” Watergate reporting.One mentor of particular note was George Porter, a Star bureau chief to whom Bernstein refers respectfully as Mr Porter and who regularly gave Bernstein a ride to the office. During the Democratic primaries in 1964, Porter dispatched Bernstein to cover George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor. Wallace never had a chance but his candidacy was newsworthy. Think Donald Trump, prototype.Why the US media ignored Murdoch’s brazen bid to hijack the presidency | Carl BernsteinRead moreLyndon Johnson, a Democrat, was in the White House but Wallace got nearly 30% in Indiana. When Wallace turned to Maryland, Bernstein was there on the ground.It was the first time he’d “seen a demagogue inflame the emotions of American citizens who I’d thought were familiar to me”.Wallace lost but netted 40% and a majority of white votes. In defeat, he blamed Black voters, except he chose a word that began with “N”, and an “incompetent press”, for failing to recognize his appeal. The church, labor unions, Ted Kennedy and “every other Democratic senator from the north” were also subjects of Wallace’s scorn.Chasing History is part-autobiography, part-history lesson. Amid continued turbulence, Bernstein’s memoirs are more than mere reminiscence.
      Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom is published in the US by Henry Holt & Company
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      Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines

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      Profusely Illustrated review: Edward Sorel and all the golden ages of New York magazines A memoir by a man who has drawn caricatures for the greatest editors is a treasure trove of the American mid-century modernAt 92, Edward Sorel is the grand old man of New York magazines. For 60 years, his blistering caricatures have lit up the pages of Harper’s, the Atlantic, Esquire, Time, Rolling Stone and the Nation. He is especially revered for his work in Clay Felker’s New York in the late 60s and for work in the New Yorker under Tina Brown and David Remnick.A life in cartoons: Edward SorelRead moreHe has also worked for slightly less august titles, like Penthouse, Screw and Ramparts.He is one of the foundational New Yorkers. Like Leonard Bernstein or E B White, Sorel absorbs the rhythms of the rambunctious city, using them to create an exaggerated, beguiling mirror of all he has experienced.A very abbreviated list of his memories includes the Great Depression, Hitler and Mussolini, the Red Scare, Joe McCarthy, Lee Harvey Oswald, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama and Trump.His memoir begins with a political frame. Like the unreconstructed lefty he is – he voted for Ralph Nader twice – he announces that he will show how the crimes of the previous 12 presidents made possible the catastrophe of Donald Trump.He gives the CIA and the military industrial complex all the shame they deserve for an unending parade of coups and wars – from Iran, Guatemala and Chile to Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. But he promises “these exposés will be brief”, so “it will only hurt for a few minutes”. On that he keeps his word.What gives Profusely Illustrated its charm and its power – besides 177 spectacular illustrations – are Sorel’s tales of New York, beginning with a childhood spent in a fifth-floor walk-up in the Bronx with a father he despised and a mother he adored.Sorel spares no one, especially his “stupid, insensitive, grouchy, mean-spirited, fault-finding, racist” father, who he dreamed of pushing in front of a subway train when he was only eight or nine.“When I grew older, I realized how wrong that would have been,” Sorel writes.“The motorman would have seen me.”The first riddle that tortured him was why his amazing mother married his revolting father. She explained that a few months after her arrival in New York from Romania, at 16, she started work in a factory that made women’s hats. When one of the hat blockers noticed on her first day that she hadn’t left for lunch, he loaned her the nickel she needed. Later, the same blocker told her he would kill himself if she didn’t marry him. So that was that.During a prolonged childhood illness that confined him to his bed, Ed started making drawings on cardboard that came back with shirts from a Chinese laundry. When he went back to school, the drawings were admired by his teacher at PS90, who told his mother young Ed had talent. She enrolled him in a Saturday art class at the other end of the city, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then another at the Little Red School House, at the bottom of Manhattan.At Little Red, thanks to the generosity of one Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, all the students were given a wooden box containing oil paints, brushes, turpentine and an enamel palette.It was Ed’s “to keep so I could paint at home” – and it changed his life.He gained admission to the highly competitive High School of Music and Art, and then to tuition-free art school at Cooper Union. But his teachers did nothing but delay his success: the fashion for abstraction was so intense, he wasn’t allowed to do the realistic work he loved.The Bronx boy who had been Eddie Schwartz was transformed after he discovered Julien Sorel, hero of Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Julien was “a sensitive young peasant who hated his father, was appalled by the corruption of the clergy in 19th-century France, and was catnip to every woman he encountered”.Five years later, Eddie changed his name to Sorel.With Seymour Chast he founded Push Pin Studios, which after Milton Glaser joined, became the hottest design studio in New York. Sorel didn’t last long but when Glaser founded New York magazine with Felker a few years later, Sorel got the perfect outlet for his increasingly powerful caricatures.His book’s pleasures include interactions with all the most important magazine editors of the second half of the last century, including George Lois, art director of Esquire in its heyday under Harold Hayes.Gay Talese had written what would become a very famous profile, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. The crooner had refused to pose for the cover, after Lois told him he wanted a close up with a cigarette in his mouth and a gaggle of sycophants eagerly trying to light it.Lois asked Sorel for an illustration. It was an assignment that would give him “more visibility than I had ever had before”. He panicked and his first effort was a failure. But with only one night left, his “adrenalin somehow made my hand turn out a terrific drawing of Frank Sinatra”. It launched Sorel’s career. The original now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.Gay Talese: ‘Most journalists are voyeurs. Of course they are’Read moreThe Village Voice, New York’s original counterculture newspaper, gave him a weekly spot. Sorel inked a memorable portrait of the New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal as a tank shooting a too-liberal columnist, Sydney Schanberg, after Schanberg was fired for attacking the news department from the op-ed page.Tina Brown chose Sorel to do her first New Yorker cover. When Woody Allen and Mia Farrow split up, Sorel imagined a Woody & Mia Analysts Convention.If you’re looking for a bird’s eye view of the glory days of magazine journalism, illustrated with drawings guaranteed to make you nostalgic for great battles of years gone by, Profusely Illustrated is perfect. When you’re done, you’ll be ready to rewatch Mad Men all over again.
      Profusely Illustrated is published in the US by Knopf
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