At a lively memorial for Norman Mailer held yesterday at Carnegie Hall, the esteemed author’s son claimed to channel his father’s spirit, a feat that turned into a tongue-in-cheek impersonation of Mailer that brought the house down. According to the Post, 42-year-old Stephen Mailer, one of nine Mailer children, stepped up to the podium, raised his arms like a revivalist, and shouted "Come on, old man, I'm all yours.”He then fell to the ground as......

William F. Buckley died in his Connecticut home today, at age 82. Some consider him the founder of modern conservatism, as he authored the seminal book in 1951 God and Man at Yale, in response to what he saw was an encroaching secularism at one of the nation's top universities, during what was considered one of the nation's most buttoned-down eras. In fact, Buckley was prescient in foreseeing the social revolution of the 1960s. After......

Author Norman Mailer passed away at Mt. Sinai Hospital this morning of renal failure. The deceased writer was the author of more than 30 books, from his debut "The Naked and The Dead," to others including "Armies of the Night," and "The Executioner's Song," for which he won a Pulitzer and the National Book Award, respectively. Mailer was known as much for his out-sized personality as for his writing. The New York Times waxes poetic......

News of Norman Mailer’s hospitalization broke today; the cantankerous and influential author is suffering from severe respiratory problems following a collapsed lung. His children have been keeping a bedside vigil in the critical-care unit of Mt. Sinai Hospital, where Mailer is reportedly still in fighting spirits, thumb-wrestling and cracking jokes. (The Post has more, while New York Magazine looks at the illness in the context of his recent ruminations on spirituality in a new book,......

We're guessing most of you are hungover from St. Patrick's Day. We are too. But still, we're going to muddle on through our green haze and give you (drum roll please...) this Week In -ists. We start with SFist which broke the -ist record for comments with nearly 500 comments on a post about our Mayor's girlfriend. She responded back on charges that she's not a "girl's girl" and, whoo boy-- the floodgates? They......

On Sundays Gothamist publishes opinion pieces by its contributors and friends. It was Mike’s week. Actually, considering the mayor’s worth more than you can imagine and New Yorkers gush over him as if he’s some kind of savior, maybe this is shaping up to be his century. Call him Bloomer, Hizzoner, Moneyberg, Li’l Mike – choose your favorite nickname. It doesn’t much matter, because you can call the short, nasily-voiced gazillionaire with an eerie ability......

Gothamist has been very excited for the premiere of Da Ali G Show's second season, because there is nothing like seeing bigwigs talking to an idiot - someone pretending very ably to be an idiot at that. But it was the NY Times' Virginia Heffernan's interview with Sacha Baron Cohen, the startlingly normal looking guy behind Ali G, Borat, and Bruno, that put Gothamist over the edge. Cohen describes some notable people's rapping style:And there's......