Robert Rosen

Mary Lyn Maiscott's birthday was last week. She happens to be my wife and I'm going to celebrate her on this blog with a video of her complete show last month at Berlin Under A, a subterranean club in New York City's East Village. Unfortunately, the tripod fell over during her first song, "My Cousin Sings Harmony." So, the video picks up in the middle of that song. The rest of the show is all there for your listening pleasure. 

 

That's Adam Tilzer on guitar, Danny Bradley on drums, Tomoko Omura on violin, and Ann Marie Nacchio on bass and harmonies.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

It's been 27 years since I worked as an editor of what were politely called "men's sophisticate" magazines. They were porn mags, and the magazine that was my primary source of income and that I facetiously referred to as a "cash cow" was D-Cup, a publication dedicated to large-breasted women. D-Cup spawned a multitude of other breast mags that I also edited, including Knockers and Bra Busters. There existed a lucrative market for this kind of material.

 

One of the phenomena I explore in my book Beaver Street is a change that occurred in this market in the late 1980s: Enormous silicone breasts came into vogue, and models started competing with one another to have the biggest bust. Some models were having two, three, even four operations in an attempt to stay a cup size ahead of the competition. Thus was born a tribe of porn stars whose names included Wendy Whoppers, Tiffany Towers, Candy Cantaloupes, Kimberly Kupps, Busty Dusty, Pandora Peaks, Deena Duo, and, Traci Topps.

 

By the early 90s, virtually every working porn model was having at least one breast augmentation and some had gone as far as to have a few ribs removed to enhance their shape. Anything to stay competitive.

 

I bring this up now because it's come to my attention that, in 2026, the large-breast trend has gone in the opposite direction. An article titled "Breast Strokes," by Elizabeth Siegel, in the January issue of Graydon Carter's newsletter, Airmail (subscription required), says that small implants are now in vogue, "exotic dancers" are getting them, and the trend has given rise to a new surgical procedure called Preservé.

 

According to Dr. Kamakshi R. Zeidler, a Silicon(!) Valley plastic surgeon quoted in the story, women today want implants that are "undetectable—cute little breasts that have very soft cleavage and a nice shape when there's no bra there."

 

These "tasteful" breast sizes are known as "fashion implants," "yoga boobs," and "ballerina breasts," and they fit "neatly into the current wellness culture and the clothes that go along with it." As another surgeon suggested, if you're looking for augmentations with "an east coast aesthetic, more sotto voce and not screaming through a megaphone," then New York is the place to get them. 

 

As a former breast editor, I'd have to conclude that gone are the days of Wendy Whoppers and company, and we've arrived at a time when women want breasts that are "proportionate, sustainable," and "refined."

 

It says so in Airmail, so I guess it's true.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

 

With apologies to Van Morrison, please do take all the bots in China, put them in a big, brown bag for me, and drop them straight into the deep blue sea.

 

A couple of months ago, I noticed that this website was being swarmed with traffic from China, sometimes more than a hundred visits a day. They were all direct hits; they never stayed on the site for more than a few seconds; and they were systematically going through everything I'd posted since I launched RobertRosenNYC.com in 2010. The overwhelming majority of the hits were coming from one city: Lanzhou.

 

This influx of Chinese traffic so overwhelmed my analytics, it made it next to impossible to figure out what I needed to know: where my real visitors were coming from, how they found the website, and which pages they were going to.

 

So I asked Google what was going on. The visitors, Google said, were bots, and Lanzhou is a Chinese hub of artificial intelligence data centers. The bots are scraping my website and using the material to train their A.I. machines.

 

I tried to set up a filter to block Chinese traffic, but it didn't work.

 

I asked the Authors Guild, who hosts this site, if anything can be done. They're "looking into it," they said.

 

With apologies to Walter Cronkite, that's just the way it is in early 2026, as A.I. attempts to rule the world and bots, Chinese and otherwise, consume every little website to feed the voracious hunger of their large language models.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

 

 

If you're reading this, I'd imagine you have some interest in me personally or the writing career I've been pursuing professionally since 1974. That's a long time to be doing anything. Over those 52 years I've published three books and more newspaper, magazine, and internet articles than I can count, on more subjects than I can keep track of.

 

I'm best known for my John Lennon book, Nowhere Man. My other books are about the history of pornography (Beaver Street) and post-war Brooklyn (A Brooklyn Memoir, originally titled Bobby in Naziland).

 

These books are "creative nonfiction," which used to be called "new journalism." Creative nonfiction is journalism that reads like fiction and is usually written in the first person. This form of writing allows me to get closer to the truth than if I obeyed the rules of standard journalism.

 

Nowhere Man, a journey through Lennon's personal diaries, could not have been written as standard journalism. Because I couldn't prove that what I knew to be true was true. To do that, I'd have needed the diaries themselves and the permission of the Lennon Estate. The Lennon Estate will not bestow either of those things upon any journalist in our lifetime. 

 

Some background: In the 1970s, I studied fiction and nonfiction writing in college and grad school with Joseph Heller, Francine du Plessix Gray, and James Toback. Since then, I've worked as a reporter, a freelance writer, a film critic, a ghostwriter, and a speechwriter. To support myself when writing wasn't paying the bills, I've driven a taxi and edited newspapers, car magazines, porn magazines, skateboard magazines, women's health and fitness magazines, and more. I've worked in magazine production at Condé Nast and worked as a writing tutor who made house calls. I've dabbled in novel writing, screenwriting, and comedy-sketch writing but have never made money doing those things—though one of my comedy sketches was produced as part of a musical variety show in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall), on the same stage that Yoko Ono once performed "Cut Piece."

 

And now, at my shockingly advanced age, I'm working on another book, which I began writing six or seven years ago. It's about a radical left-wing student newspaper, Observation Post (OP), that I edited at the City College of New York at a time when idealistic antiwar activism was giving way to despair and the first rumblings of outrage-for-the-sake-of-outrage punk. What happened on OP was a microcosm of what was happening in an Amerika being torn apart, just as it's being torn apart today.

 

The book's title is a play on the title of a classic novel. It's a phrase that doesn't turn up in internet searches or anywhere else, and I don't want A.I. to gobble it up and spread it around until I've completely finished the book. So I'm keeping the title under wraps as I edit and refine the manuscript. My new year's resolution: Find a new agent. My old agent, Jim Fitzgerald, died a few years ago. He's the guy who sold Nowhere Man.  

 

Writing the book is the easy part. Finding the right publisher is the hard part. Promoting it is the hardest part—because even if you or your publisher spends a lot of money on professional PR, there are no guarantees that any media organ of significance will deem your book worthy of coverage. 

 

If you're eagerly anticipating the new book, I'd suggest this is a good time to catch up with the old ones. Read 'em if you haven't. Read 'em again if you have.

 

Happy New Year and thanks for reading!

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.