George Murphy, Ronald Reagan and Fred (“Love Boat”) Grandy did it. So why shouldn’t actor Alec Baldwin try his hand at politics?
If U.S. Sen. Al D’Amato (R-N.Y.) isn’t careful, writes June Esquire, “he could face a career challenge of sorts” from Baldwin, who’s politically active and a Democratic fundraiser.
It falls rather short of an announcement of his candidacy (D’Amato is up for re-election in 1998), but the men’s monthly, in an issue otherwise devoted to whether “Women Love Men?” quotes an unidentified source as declaring that Baldwin is “always cornering politicians to get their views on various issues and sees D’Amato as vulnerable now.”
If one thing is unambiguous, it’s the actor’s lack of admiration for the senator.
Interviewed by the magazine last year, the hubby of actress Kim Basinger called D’Amato a “bozo pool attendant from Island Park” (on New York’s Long Island, also home turf for Baldwin).
He also expressed the hope that D’Amato would “get in a serious ski accident. I’m talking about a large tree.”
Quickly: “This Pen For Hire,” in June Harper’s, is a wonderful commentary on the state of higher education. It’s the first-person account (name and actual firm withheld) of an “academic call girl,” namely a woman who writes college term papers, book reports, senior theses and take-home exams for a company “in a large Canadian city.” At times, she can convince herself to try to write good stuff. But when she’s at the firm’s office, “next to someone (a student ordering a paper) elegant and young and in eight hundred bucks’ worth of calfskin leather, someone who not only has never heard of John Stuart Mill and never read Othello but doesn’t even know he hasn’t, doesn’t even mind that he hasn’t, and doesn’t even care that he hasn’t, the urge to make something that will last somehow vanishes.” . . . May 29 New Yorker has a nifty tale on how one of New York’s best-known skyscrapers, the 59-story Citicorp tower, was in potential peril of falling as a result of structural weaknesses discovered in 1978. The article relies heavily on the account of the structural engineer, who came clean to the client after being warned by an architecture student researching a paper that there was a big problem in the design of the building’s unusual system of wind braces. . . . June-July Men’s Journal inspects what appears to be an increasingly important element of American military strategy, the only combined special-operations military group, comprising elite members of the Army, Navy and Air Force. The story is generally praiseworthy on this highly trained, macho bunch of guys who are increasingly primed for the toughest assignments. But it does include the cautionary note of military-hero-turned-analyst David Hackworth: “Special Forces are only as good as the people giving the orders. All the Special Forces in the world and all their toys can’t bail them out of a losing situation.” . . . Corporate America doesn’t get much more vicious, petty and self-serving than W.R. Grace & Co., as May 29 Business Week lays out in its cover tale, “Fall From Grace.” Despite most previous reports about chief executive J.P. Bolduc’s ouster, this article underscores that there was far more to it, notably a long-planned backstabbing engineered by the petty, self-dealing patrician founding family and its lapdog board of directors. . . . June 5 Forbes ASAP, from Forbes magazine, checks out how Visa International is trying to use computer technology to catch credit-card thieves, specifically by using a “neural net,” or mini computer-based system with the ability to detect patterns. Perhaps the computer is struck by a $500 jewelry store purchase in Des Moines because the system would know the legal cardholder has never been to Des Moines, never spent more than $50 on the card, or never bought jewelry with it before. First Chicago used the same system on a pilot basis last year and says it saved more than $2.3 million in six months as it helped detect fraudulent purchases. . . . And June Harper’s Bazaar explores trends in bisexuality over recent decades, maintaining that in the 1970s it was very public and was about androgyny (“blurring the lines, erasing borders”), went underground in the 1980s amid the coming of AIDS but is returning with an emphasis “not on blurring boundaries but on crossing them” in a showy way.
