There's a new meme going around, begun by a blogger named Julia Miranda and propagated here, to the effect that the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz's money troubles, which have forced her to pawn the copyright to her photos, were caused by inheritance tax she had to pay on property left to he...

  Netflix will offer a streaming-only service, but apparently it still won't be available to Mac users. [Wired] Former Hugh Hefner flame and original Girl Next Door Holly Madison has split from Criss Angel after nearly four months. [Yahoo!] It looks like there's some not-so-hot lesbian ...

After her death, much has been made of critic and author Susan Sontag's lesbian identity (something she rarely discussed during her life). With the recent publication of early diaries, reluctantly edited by her son (see article to find out why he was so reluctant), we learn about an SM affair she ha...

I just stumbled onto the 1957–58 diary of Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, the lover identified as "H" in Reborn, Susan Sontag's diary of the same period . If you, like me, have read Sontag's diary and were swept up in its heady melodrama, you will probably not be able to resist peeking at Zwerling's ver...

"People may seem to sympathize, really they despise you a little. Weakness is a contagion, strong people rightly shun the weak." That's a note in a private journal. How would you describe the writer? 1. Someone who is trying very hard "to transcend her limitations, to imagine a different way of exis...

Long before she was America's intellectual ice queen, sometimes-lover of photographer Annie Liebowitz and what Camille Paglia once described as the "sanctimonious moralist of the old-guard literary world", activist, writer and philosopher Susan Sontag was a cute little baby dyke runni...

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1964 By Susan Sontag Farrar, Straus and Giroux,304 pages, $24 Whither the Dear Diaries, the PRIVATE—KEEP OUTs, the flimsy locks and matching steel keys? Some day, when historians settle on what exactly was wrought by this decade’s personal technologies, atop ...

Is it just me, or is there a kind of suspended-animation feel to these mid-December weeks? Santa Claus is coming to town, but he’s not here yet; Barack Obama is coming, too, but that’s not till January. ’Tis the season to be waiting—and to help us understand our predicament, we have Harold S...

Buongiorno Buongiornissimo. Oggi è lunedì – ci sono stati ben tre giorni di tregua preceduti anche da post concettosi come un cavallo a dondolo e perciò somministreròvvi un articolo complesso ancorché noiosissimo, per la cui lettura valgono le solite regole: stacanovismo, sprezzo del pericolo...

(Even though it's Wednesday morning here in Tokyo) Scott McLemee reviews Swimming in a Sea of Death, a new book on Susan Sontag's months by her son, David Rieff.  Rieff will be reading in Paris next month at the Village Voice, which is appropriate since, as McLemee argues, Sontag should be read...