The Timeless Town

In the 1960s, some young writers like Tom Wolfe, Pete Hamill, Gay Talese and others began a movement called the "New Jouralism" -- a kind of rock'n'roll writing that was funny, nasty, entertaining, high voltage, and told from a personal perspective but that still skewed to the riguers of the journalistic craft.

They wrote for all the big magazines like Esquire, The New Yorker, New York, and others, and also published big best-selling books.

Most of the New Journalist writers are gone now but Gay Talese, at age 93, is still around. In fact, he's just published a new book about NYC called A Town Without Time, a collection of his writings about the city. I can't wait to read it -- a book about the greatest city by one of its greatest writers.

An NYC legend.

If you want to know more about Gay Talese excellent work, you should read his 1969 about The New York Times called The Kingdom and the Power, his famous 1966 essay "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (regarded as one of the greatest single pieces of journalism ever written), and his 1980 about the rise of swinging and sexual liberation called Thy Neighbor's Wife. We'll probably never see his likes again.