Playboy

From The New Yorker's collection of letters written by Norman Mailer to everyone from his parents to Jackie Kennedy to William F. Buckley and Don DeLillo:

To the Editor of Playboy
December 21, 1962
Dear Sir,

I wish you hadn’t billed the debate between William Buckley and myself as a meeting between a conservative and a liberal. I don’t care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal.

Yours,

Norman Mailer

It was a cheeky idea, listing Chris Napolitano as a co-host last night at Hotel QT. Imagine, the editor of Playboy magazine co-hosting a party in honor of a book on Christianity, Daniel Radosh’s new one: Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.

Some of the people Mr. Radosh interviewed as part of his research for the book came to the party, too. Everyone else was either a Scribner editor or Nick Denton/Maer Roshan. Jeff Bercovici and Alex Balk were there, too; also fully nine people besides Mr. Napolitano who worked at Playboy and maybe a dozen Oberlin grads.

A 58-year-old Vietnam veteran named Chris MacIntosh, who hosts a Christian rock radio show out of a college station in Long Island, stood by the wall in the back. Mr. Radosh had come up to his studio to visit him when he was working on his book.  read more »