O’Melveny & Myers Partner Is Blogging About 'Mad Men' for the WSJ
Love Mad Men, the award-winning AMC drama about New York ad men (and a few women) in the 1960s? So does U.S. Supreme Court lawyer Walter Dellinger, who is hosting an online discussion about each season 4 episode on the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog, which focuses on media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts.
Dellinger is a partner with the Washington, D.C., office of O’Melveny & Myers, Dellinger headed the Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton Administration. Dellinger starts the “conversation” by posting shortly after each episode ends at 11 p.m. ET, while the other four contributors—literature professor Toril Moi, political science professor David Paletz, media expert Evangeline Morphos, and historian Alan Brinkley—later update the posts with their own thoughts
Dellinger got the Wall Street Journal gig after someone noticed his posts in another Mad Men conversation on Slate.
In a July 25 post, Dellinger notes that in the summer of 1965, he was a law clerk at the Madison Avenue law firm Paul, Weiss Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, and was “astounded by the lavish lunchtime drinking” he witnessed. Dellinger’s wife, Anne Maxwell Dellinger, was then a technical writer and editor with an insurance company, and was one of the few professional women in her New York City office.
“We have marveled at how accurately Mad Men re-creates that period’s changing world of women’s roles. The treatment of what it was like to be gay seems to be extremely sensitive, and the shadow of anti-Semitism is also deftly handled,” Dellinger wrote. “It is not yet clear whether the show will have the same sensitivity to issues of race.”
