Eric Alterman | The Nation

My new "Think Again" column is called “Cracks in the Worldwide Murdoch Empire” and it tracks the happy events reported here.

My Nation column is here.

I believe my review of a wonderful show by John Hammond and John Mayall at the Jazz@Lincoln Center’s Allen Room a couple of weeks ago got lost somehow, due to my own personal screwups. I managed to stay up late enough to see the final of four separate sets.

My new “Think Again” column is called “Is America Getting More Conservative?” and it's here.

Richard Thompson live, in person and on bluray:
I saw Richard Thompson do one of three “all request” shows at City Winery. It was a particularly engaging affair. Thompson sort of did the requests that had been deposited in a bowl beforehand, and sort of didn’t depending on whether he felt like it. Some of them he did even though they were pretty silly, including McCartney’s “Blackbird” and Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” He was playing solo and not all the sightlines were great, but it’s ok, because Thompson is not so pretty to look at, and the sound was crisp and clear particularly on his guitar. The song selection turned out to be pretty excellent too. There’s a new Eagle Rock Entertainment's release both on DVD and bluray of Thompson’s band called “Live At Celtic Connections.” It’s got twenty songs on it and comes in at nearly two and a half hours. The sound on bluray is killer. The song selection leans heavily on Dream Attic, his last album, which was recorded live, and the second set does the catalogue back to 1972, and is, I suppose, a matter of taste. You get “Wall of Death” and “Tear Stained Letter” but I could have used “The Dimming of the Day” in either place but nobody asked me. The bonus features include two extra songs filmed at the 2011 Cambridge Folk Festival: "Uninhabited Man" and "Johnny's Far Away."

My new Think Again column is called "When Books Disappear" and it's here.

And I appear to be in the news: (From the NY Daily News, at a luncheon for The Giants on Wednesday):

While the luncheon brought out a bipartisan crowd, there was a little Republican-Democrat friction when the Nation columnist Eric Alterman approached Bill O’Reilly to thank him for apologizing on-air in 2004 for calling Alterman a “Fidel Castro confidant.” (On a later show, O’Reilly sarcastically claimed he was “foolin’ around.”) Alterman says “O’Reilly responded by twice saying, “Get away from me,” and eventually summoning a handler to intervene. O’Reilly told us there was “no run-in,” but Alterman said, “I’m beginning to think that maybe he wasn’t all that sorry.”