Which Part of This Performance Art Space Is the Actual Hotel Room?

MINNEAPOLIS—Do you ever walk into a hotel room in a strange city and get the feeling you’ve been invited to a sleepover at a 1960s-style love-in staged at the Museum of Modern Art? No? Haven’t yet had that experience of searching for the coffee maker in the morning, then realizing ...

Suntory Hibiki

500 Years of Moonshine Might, You Know, Taste Better

PHILADELPHIA—Lately I’ve been performing in the state that went to war over whiskey—the Whiskey Rebellion lasted longer than World War II and had several Barley Malt Martyrs—and frankly I don’t like the way they’re honoring their heritage. In Philadelphia I was offered a local rye ...

Jim Acosta

The Media Shouldn’t Whine to the Courts

NEW YORK—I don’t like it when newspapers or TV networks go whining to the courts. And it’s for a very selfish reason. The media in this country has the best deal on the planet: Once we print something, or broadcast something, you can’t touch us. We don’t have any of those weird ...

Resisting the Campus Speech Nazis


DENVER—Every time I perform, I start out with a few comments about Safe Spaces and Trigger Warnings. 
I flash onto the screen a picture of a sensory deprivation chamber in a hostel in downtown Cleveland and say, “This is your safe space. It’s not here.” 
And then I show a ...

Be Kind to Your Stripper

NEW YORK—They just passed a new policy at Under Armour, the giant sports-apparel company with the cool corporate headquarters facing Baltimore Harbor: No more business lunches at strip clubs. Well, actually, that’s not what they said. They said no more charging visits to strip clubs on ...

Leave Harvard Alone

NEW YORK—I can’t believe this, but I’m about to defend Harvard. Four years ago a group of Asian-Americans sued Harvard, claiming the college’s admissions policies discriminate against Asians. Actually it’s not clear to me whether they’re claiming discrimination against Asians ...

I’m Calling for a Stupidity Boycott

AUSTIN—I think I have to boycott Kimberly-Clark. I’m sorry, guys. I know you’re a $46 billion company with 43,000 employees doing business in 175 countries, so obviously this is gonna be rough on your Corporate Social Compliance division (yes, that’s a thing). I doubt you have the ...

The Apathy Party

SAN ANTONIO—In my college days I was a card-carrying member of the Apathy Party. Each year we would nominate “Mr. Commodore” for student government president, Mr. Commodore being a nine-foot Disney-style football mascot with a giant head that made him look like a cartoon version of Cornelius ...

The New Standard of Lifetime Detention Hall

DALLAS—The most amazing thing to me about the Kavanaugh Mess was the thousands of hours spent on psychoanalyzing his high school years. If anybody ever psychoanalyzed my high school years and hauled me before a Congressional committee to talk about it, they would end up asking questions ...

Okay, Coach, Then Don’t Feed Your Football Team

NEW YORK—The reason I stopped being a sportswriter was that I could no longer deal with the concept of the coach’s interview. Since I was only 13 when I started, I initially thought it was my own problem. You ask the coach a question—at first it was high school football coaches—and they ...