Kenneth Starr

What happens when a titan of journalism moves into classes at Boston University and things get real?

According to the Rate My Professors.com entries over the last two years on former New Yorker writer and Ken Starr scourge Renata Adler:

How many profs have wikipedia entries longer than most congressmen's? [...] Tells great stories, assigns great lit. Hot for goin on 70

By far the most interesting professor I've ever had. Today she told us that a scene from Woody Allen's "Manhatten" is taken from a conversation she had with Woody. That's crazy!

Renata Adler is a super cool person- so intelligent and interesting and crazy, but she's also an awful teacher. But, her antecdotes about working at the New Yorker and The New York Times (plus the A's she gave everyone in the class) was well worth my time

Totally skatterbrained, never stays on topic, i did no work at all for this class, class is a 80 min free association.

"The oral-sex craze—and in particular girls' insistence that blowjobs 'aren't sex'—has often been blamed on Bill Clinton and his semantic calisthenics during the Kenneth Starr investigation. But even if teen girls were looking to the White House for personal guidance, was it really Bubba they were trying to emulate? Girls' private lives are always much more influenced by First Daughters, or even First Ladies, than they are by any pasty politico." - Are You There God? It's Me, Monica, by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic, January 2006. [via Powells]

"The idea that a blowjob is a dirty, unsavory chore persists. For some women, they're used as an out when she doesn't want to have sex (or as household quid pro quo: 'If you take out the garbage, I'll give you a bj')."- Long Live Blowjob Nation, by Rachel Kramer Bussell, The Village Voice, April 21, 2006.

"Pardon the following intimacy, but performing oral sex has a lot to do with the unequal distribution of pleasure and power. It's more satisfying for the recipient than for the bestower. Without love or emotional connection, it usually makes the bestower an instrument of the recipient's will." - AGAINST "SUCKS", by Lee Siegel, TNR.com, April 28, 2006.

"Girls and boys, it turns out, are about equally likely to give and to receive. Actually, at least among younger adolescents, boys overall reported more oral sex experience than girls, but both boys and girls were more likely to report receiving oral sex than giving it--which suggests a lot of respondents are fibbing." - The Great Fellatio Scare, by Cathy Young, Reason, May 2006.

"There is another thinkable reason why this ancient form of lovemaking lost its association with the dubious and the low and became an American handshake and ideal. The United States is par excellence the country of beautiful dentistry. As one who was stretched on the grim rack of British 'National Health' practice, with its gray-and-yellow fangs, its steely-wire 'braces,' its dark and crumbly fillings, and its shriveled and bleeding gums, I can remember barely daring to smile when I first set foot in the New World. Whereas when any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth, lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent tongue." - As American as Apple Pie, by Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, July 2006.  read more »

The Clinton administration's grave comedy of manners has been rehashed so many times now, and tossed off so many strange offspring, that any remaining, would-be Clintonian chroniclers are left staring at (ahem! Ed Klein) the bottom of the literary barrel.

There's no way left to swing it, so a troupe of eager musical theater folk have determined...to sing it. Monica! The Musical first appeared last spring. Now, a refined (errr, make that "updated") version, which premiered last night, has already sold out four of six shows at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. As your devoted Politicker slave, I went to see for myself.

The cast tromps all over the beaten path, from the tasteless to the clever, with an emphasis on the former. There's lots of physical comedy: Hillary is an amusingly spastic dancer, frugging her heart out, while Bill has a languid, frat-boy lope that makes him look more Animal House than White House. During a press conference, a frenzied George Stephanopoulos tries to mow down Ken Starr with a presidential podium on wheels.

Set against the slapstick backdrop, Monica dreams of someday being "Monica Rodham Clinton." "Now don't cry," Bill tells her, off in a corner at the inaugural ball."You're breaking my heart. And you're being very loud."  read more »

What else? Hillary dreams of taking over and...Well, there's that cameo by Tom Jones. He sings away sexual scruples ("Forget it! Forget it! Forgetitforgetit!") while introducing Bill, the young Rhodes scholar, to British prostitutes with lousy teeth.

Leaving the theater, this is what I was thinking: A) There's a reason I'm not a theater critic; and B) In light of the present administration, it doesn't take a musical to create nostalgia for the mildness of Clinton's missteps.

Under the harsh but savvy tutelage of Karl Rove, Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated their adhe  read more »

While the New York Observer is not a family newspaper, this is a family blog. So expect circumlocutions. This afternoon, Room 9 is all atitter over a pile of envelopes, left discreetly near the door. The contents were copies of a short, handwritten love letter apparently from a former City Hall bigwig, whom there's no reason to name, to a woman who was also among the 300,000, as we think of the City payroll.

"Eat you later" was the valediction.  read more »

Now, I'm hoping nobody other than me writes about this. And I'm doing it only, of course, to make this high-minded point: This is Kenneth Starr's fault. And blame Allan Jennings too.

Our 42nd President is famous.Famous for putting duties off to the last possible moment (and sometime  read more »

As anyone who has written a book about American politics in recent years can confirm, many members o  read more »

Political Fictions , by Joan Didion. Alfred A.  read more »

As Dan Rather demonstrated when he interviewed the President on 60 Minutes II, the Clinton legacy wi  read more »

Whatever he now feels about his former role as spokesman for the Office of Independent Counsel, Char  read more »

On June 22, the fax machine spit out a press release of slightly less than two pages from the Office  read more »

In journalistic circles, much has been made of alleged errors in A Vast Conspiracy , Jeffrey Toobin'  read more »

The other day Robert Ray-the prosecutor appointed to succeed former independent counsel Kenneth Star  read more »

If news reports are to be believed, we are now close to the conclusion of that long-running politica  read more »

A Vast Conspiracy , by Jeffrey Toobin.  read more »

At long last, Kenneth Starr has returned to private life, but not without a few final gestures of co  read more »

The campaign bookkeeping for next year's New York Senate race  read more »

A famous man once said, "The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over ag  read more »

Remember Sam Dash, the former "ethics counsel" to the independent counsel?  read more »

The campaign bookkeeping for next year's U.S.  read more »

An open letter to Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks:

Dear Mr. Schultz,  read more »

Psst. Firm guy. Tired of long hours, backbiting, bullying, the long and slow chase?  read more »

Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, is a kind of cultural villain, a personification of unchecke  read more »

Federal prosecutors are heading back to school, and they owe it all to Kenneth Starr.  read more »

It is tempting to agree with Kenneth Starr that the Independent Counsel Act should be allowed to exp  read more »

How refreshing and how rare, to see the completion of justice twice in a single day.  read more »

However the human disaster in Kosovo ends, there is at least one Washington official whose fortunes  read more »

Blacks and Jews have often helped one another politically, and this has been the case in the Clinton  read more »

The past year's carnival of national scandal-with all its noisy displays of lechery and hypocrisy, l  read more »

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make swear out affidavits.  read more »

As the herd of Republican lemmings thunders toward its chosen precipice, indignation continues to re  read more »

Of all the arguments offered by Democrats during the impeachment ofPresident Bill Clinton, the weake  read more »

When it comes to targets, Dan Moldea likes to aim high.As a young freelance reporter, he was beaten  read more »

What next?  read more »

When the word "surreal" becomes a commonplace, the world has gone too weird for words.  read more »

The speech Bill Clinton delivered on Aug.  read more »

As Kenneth Starr's investigation of the President proceeds, so does the Federal judiciary's investig  read more »

The airwaves and newsprint tell us everything except what we want to be told.  read more »

Did Kenneth Starr fold?Suddenly, after months of stalemated bargaining, Mr.  read more »

Did you hear?  read more »

When David Brock was working on his now-notorious "Troopergate" article for The American Spectator m  read more »

After months of indignant denials from Kenneth Starr, we now learn from his own lips, via Steven Bri  read more »

Certainly Kenneth Starr will stand out in the history of independent counsels, festooned with such n  read more »

Dread, a sinking in the stomach, is coming over me.  read more »

Those talkative "sources close to" Kenneth Starr sound strangely subdued of late, as if the Whitewat  read more »

Not long after the April 3 disclosure that he had been secretly talking about job opportunities with  read more »

The sanctity of bookstores aside, the latest casualty of Kenneth Starr's jihad is the illusion of im  read more »

The Justice Department is scrutinizing the so-called "Arkansas Project," conservative billionaire Ri  read more »

There are people in public life who don't remember anything that happened before yesterday-or who ho  read more »

To commit, suborn or conceal perjury, even in a civil lawsuit, is reprehensible.  read more »