Personal Information

Biography

Destor23 (Michael Maiello) is a New York based columnist, performer, fiction author and playwright. He worked for ten years at Forbes Media, writing and editing for both Forbes Magazine and Forbes.com. He is also the author of the 2004 book Buy The Rumor, Sell The Fact: 85 Wall Street Maxims and What They Really Mean. He has performed stand up comedy at The Laugh, The Comic Strip and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and now reads regularly with Mama D's Arts Bordello in New York. He has had three plays published (Night of Faith and Waiting For Death by Playscripts.com and Principia by The New York Theatre Experience). He currently writes a weekly column for The Daily, a News Corp. publication designed for tablet computers (his column appears Wednesdays and is generally the focus of a related post here at dagblog).

History

Member for

3 years 13 weeks

Blog

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Blog Posts

You Can Take It With You

by destor23 5/16/2012 - 11:37 am   |

• Politics

Eduardo Saverin, something of a villain in the Facebook tale, is about the become a billionaire, assuming the social network's initial public offering, scheduled for this week, is successful.  From the $15,000 he invested to help Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg pay for servers, Saverin will get an estimated $4 billion payday. [Read more]

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Willard Scissormitts

by destor23 5/10/2012 - 4:55 pm   |

• Politics

We all did stupid things when we were young and the private preparatory academies of the type that Romney attended in the fifties and sixties were settings for all sorts of bullying and boorish behaviors and boys forced unnaturally together in search of A Separate Peace.

Adult Romney wants tales from his high schools years to be filed away under "youthful indiscretions" and left there.  I don't blame him.  I don't even like seeing pictures of myself in high school.  I had a mullet.  Some things are best left in the recesses of our memories. [Read more]

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In Defense of The Generalist Columnist

by destor23 5/9/2012 - 10:16 am   |

• Politics

No, I'm not defending Naomi Schafer Riley as any art form, including the writing of an 800-900 word newspaper article can be practiced badly.  To not even read what you're criticizing is pretty low.  But Dr. Cleveland, Professor of Dagblog, sets a very high standard for columnists.  Paul Krugman, who sticks (usually) to his discipline, is praised while David Brooks and Ross Douthat are singled out for writing on a broader array of topics which they cannot, by definition, claim expertise. [Read more]

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Thomas Friedman Writes For The Daily Planet

by destor23 4/30/2012 - 10:44 am

Superman, Where Are You?

By Thomas L. Friedman

 

I had to catch a train in Washington last week.  The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though our very planet was going to disintegrate beneath my feet and that I should consider building a rocket ship to send my son to live on some other planet, or, failing that, a better run country like India. I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, which really should be called the Decela, am I right?  I also experienced several dropped cellphone calls and sent several text messages that were garbled by my phone’s autocorrect feature.  America needs a renewal.

  [Read more]

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Is Our Columnists Learning?

by destor23 4/27/2012 - 3:11 pm   |

• Politics

"Is Our Adults Learning?" asks David Brooks in The New York Times today (the paper where columnists don't appear to be edited much.)  In this column, Brooks talks about the fight between stimulus supporters and austerity supporters.  He concludes that both sides relied on grand theories but that three years and $800 billion later, we are none the wiser as to which policy choice was better: [Read more]

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Wise Men

by destor23 4/21/2012 - 11:18 pm   |

• Politics

I'm certainly not the first to make this observation.  Logicians going back to Aristotle and probably prior, have warned us about the potential tyranny of experts that can arise in any society.  Even people with credentials can be wrong.  Einstein made mistakes.  When William F. Buckley joked, a long time ago, that he would rather be ruled by a random sampling from the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard, he did have something of a point. [Read more]

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Silver Spoons

by destor23 4/19/2012 - 9:59 am   |

• Personal

I was actually a little embarassed for Talkingpointsmemo when I read its kind of breathless coverage of Obama stating the obvious fact that he "wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth."  TPM's editors seemed to think this was some sort of Oscar Wildean bon mot or Mencken-style broadside worth repeating.

It's a fine thing for Obama to say, though I wish he'd avoid cliche when he does it.  Everybody knows that Obama is self-made and that Romney's dad was a business executive and the former Governor of Michigan.  [Read more]

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Unforced Obama Errors

by destor23 4/12/2012 - 8:13 pm   |

• Politics

I have a lot of sympathy for the position the president is in with our intransigent opposition party in control of part of Congress.  Yes, the stimulus was too small and yes, his advisors urged him to concede that fight too early, but given that the other side was bent on "doing nothing," I understand the reasons for the outcome.  With healthcare, traitors within his own party's caucus sealed the fate of the public option.  No speech will make Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman come around to a more liberal solution. [Read more]

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Term Limits For Supreme Court Justices

by destor23 4/11/2012 - 10:33 am   |

• Politics

When it comes to Social Security and Medicare, there's no shortage of pundits willing to tell me that the promises the government made to us in the past can no longer be kept because people are living longer, healthier lives than they used to. These arguments tend to be bogus because they ignore the fact that lifespans have increased, in part, because infant mortality is down.

But there's one group of people who are certainly living longer, healthier lives than they were back when the nation was founded -- the influential, rich and powerful justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, who have unfettered access to the best health care in the world along with jobs that ain't exactly coal mining when it comes to the toll taken on the body.  This is why in my Daily column today, I argue for term limits on Supreme Court justices. [Read more]

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A Fantastic Tumblr

by destor23 4/5/2012 - 7:49 pm

It's not mine, but I was once involve in a musical theatre event with this very clever writer:

http://horseysurprise.tumblr.com/

I check it all the time.  Thought you might all be amused.

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