Mr. Media Interviews by Bob Andelman

From 2008: If you want to see daily comic strips in their classic form, the place I’d steer you is cartoonist Patrick McDonnell’s “Mutts.” Finely drawn, acerbic in voice yet sweet by nature, gentle in image yet often violent in humor, “Mutts” is a throwback to the earliest days of the art form, when a brick to the head meant “I love you” and the illustrations took more space than the words.

From 2008: Rolling Stone writer David Wild has harbored a secret man crush for decades. Today, he will come out of the closet and fess up: He’s in love with Neil Diamond. Wild testifies to this forbidden love in a new sort-of biography, He Is… I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond, which is, at times, as much about Wild as it is about Diamond.

From 2008: Craig Glazer, the author of a new book called The King of Sting: The King of Sting: The Amazing True Story of a Modern American Outlaw, might remind you of another good guy/bad guy: Frank Abagnale Jr., the author of Catch Me If You Can. The difference, I think, if that Abagnale was a scam artist; Glazer was a sting artist. Subtle difference? We’ll see.

From 2008: Gail Simmons, editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine, has the best gig of all the judges. Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio have to hang around each day for most of the challenges while Gail helicopters in for the final tastings and judgings. She always looks composed and ready, sharp and spicy assessments ever at the ready. This season she is even getting featured in an episode, as the competing chefs cook for her bridal shower. Should be fun.

From 2008: Joining me today is a co-founder of VoiceThread, Steve Muth. I encourage you to visit voicethread.com and set up a free account while we talk because I expect we’ll go through a bit of a tutorial momentarily.

From 2008: My recollections are a drop in the bucket compared with the ones collected by Harvey Frommer in his new coffee table book, Remembering Yankee Stadium. It is packed not just with oral histories collected from some of the greatest Yankees players, managers, sports writers and fans, but is also filled with awesome photos from decades of historic moments.

From 2008: Bruce Davison already owns a chunk of pop culture—he was devious Senator Robert Kelly in the first two X-Men movies and has appeared in episodes of everything from “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” to “Terminator” and “The L Word.” So it can’t be too much of a surprise that when the producers of NBC’s new “Knight Rider” series wanted a genre veteran to lend credibility to the show, they, too, turned to Davison.

From 2008L Romance is the top genre in fiction with more than $1.47 billion dollars in sales for 2007. The average romance reader is voracious and goes through 6-7 books per month. Within the genre, there are many specializations, including tonight’s topic: romance novels written by and for African-American readers. My guest is Michele Cameron, author of Never Say Never and the hot-off-the-press Moments of Clarity… Also joining us is her editor at Genesis Press, Deborah Schumacher.

From 2008: Photographer Bob Gruen just published a new collection of his classic photos, this time capturing the New York Dolls, which once upon a time starred David Johansen, Johnny Thunders, Billy Murcia and Arthur Kane. The book – with its shocking pink cover – is titled, simply, New York Dolls: Photographs. If you know anything about the Dolls, you’ll want this book on your coffee table. It’ll be a good bookend for other Gruen collections, including John Lennon: The New York Years and The Clash.

From 2008: Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin (pronounced bar-new-in) are the co-authors of three books whose titles start with Skinny Bitch: the original Skinny Bitch, the first sequel, Skinny Bitch in the Kitch, and the latest release, Skinny Bitch: Bun in the Oven. The books are, at their core, diet guides with a strong vegan slant. But what gets your attention is the tone, the attitude, the cold, hard slap n the face.