“Slow Learner” was the title of a novel by Thomas Pynchon, with a hefty dose of irony. I never thought I’d apply it to a self-anointed newspaper of record, The New York Times

I’ve been called many things in my life, some with a germ of truth and some with a full-blown head cold. But my favorite occurred in 2003, when the late New York Post editor and MSNBC editor-in-chief, Jerry Nachman, welcomed me on his show as “the so-called father of reality TV.”

1969. A half-century removed from today. It was blurry then, and it’s blurrier now.

“Get me rewrite!” So went the popular image of the rewrite editor at the other end of the line from the reporter breathlessly dictating into the phone.

“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why, counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America,” sang Simon & Garfunkel in 1968 on “Bookends,” the literary album covering youthful innocence and old age.

Well it’s final: the results are in, and those of us over 50 who watch more than 3.5 hours of TV a day show twice the decline in verbal memory over six years. A recently released study, in Britain’s Scientific Reports, looks at nearly 3,600 adults and confirms it.

The movies were my school.

The Trump administration intends to slap a 5 percent tariff on every medium-sized car, avocado and other Mexican import beginning June 10, affecting nearly $1 billion worth of goods that crosses the border into the U.S. each day on average.

Giant digital companies don’t like to admit error. Or fix the problem and apologize.

“I kill therefore I am” sang the late Phil Ochs, the Vietnam War-era protest singer. And throughout the history of media, writers, directors and producers have more than lived up to that credo.

The checkout line at the supermarket is a surprising mix of dark secrets and brain candy. Every time I need milk and eggs, I feel like Odysseus caught between Scylla and Charybdis: to the right of me, the dreaded chocolate bars, a whirlpool of cocoa and sugar that sucks me down, and to the l…

The history of blaming the media for the ills of adolescents, let alone society writ large, is long and colorful.

Bias comes in many forms. The inherent human tendency to lean in one direction due to family, community, ethnicity, gender, race or politics -- or simply for pure crankiness and an insecure need to disparage someone or something else -- is not likely to lessen anytime soon.

As this column reaches its second year, entering in media’s race for your delectation, my buddy Tripp insisted I watch the HBO documentary on the late columnist Jimmy Breslin and his still-tart colleague-in-crime Pete Hamill.

Washington has become a mad political war zone.

“All Gaul is divided into three parts.” Julius Caesar said that. “The World Wide Web is effectively dead.” I said that.

It was five years ago that my father passed away on Valentine’s Day. His little joke, as in: remember me. How could I not? Every 14th of February finds me standing by him at Arlington National Cemetery as winter wind—some years rain, some years snow—chills me right through the red vest he pa…

“Every picture tells a story,” sang Rod Stewart in 1971, well into the electronic media age. At its dawning, in 1918, the San Antonio Light first touted “One picture is worth a thousand words,” advertising its coverage of World War I.

President Trump evoked the Wounded Knee massacre in a recent tweet reacting to an Instagram video Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted on New Year’s Eve, the day after she announced she was forming an exploratory committee for a possible presidential run.

The words are the thing.

Many of us now in our 30s and 40s can't imagine growing up without the Beastie Boys. Whether our key formative years were in the mid-to-late 1980s or anytime in the 1990s, the trio of New York rappers was always there, defining everything wild, fun and possible in hip-hop and beyond, guiding us through adolescence with all the dubious authority and miscreant wisdom of an older cousin that our parents would prefer we’d avoid.

An influx of women candidates helped turn the midterm elections into what many observers have dubbed  the “Year of the Woman.”

In discussions about the so-called “digital divide” between the haves and the have nots, the common wisdom is that we need to get more computers and internet access into the hands of minority and rural children.

Stock markets have slumped in recent months over a variety of concerns, from President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war with China to worries about an economic slowdown and rising interest rates.

Nearly four decades have passed since Darrell Siggers basted a turkey on Christmas Eve. The 54-year-old Detroiter was released from prison in August, after serving 34 years for a murder he didn't commit.

“So this is Christmas, and what have you done?”

A kinder, gentler snow is falling over Main Street in Litchfield, Connecticut, as we step out of the restaurant. The flakes are tiny dancers swirling in the air, a thousand points of light.

George H.W. Bush was the last person elected president of the United States with any prior foreign policy experience.

It’s a Netflix world; the rest of us are only living in it.

The era of firebrand White House journalists such as Helen Thomas, Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson is over, the victim of a president who built his fame on pomposity.

Democracy is gratefully about constitutional rights.

In democracy, government is about protocol.

In democratic government, it is gratefully about protocol.

It appears journalists are headed for a defining moment with President Donald Trump over the right of the press to ask him tough questions in a manner the president considers rude and hostile.