[2] PJ Media's name, formerly Pajamas Media, is derived from a dismissive comment made by former news executive vice-president Jonathan Klein of CBS during the Killian documents affair involving then-CBS anchorman Dan Rather in the fall of 2004: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances at 60 Minutes and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas".
Roger L. Simon began to develop the idea for Moses Wine when Alan Rinzler, who was working as an editor at Straight Arrow Books, a venture by Rolling Stone, suggested that a book Simon had written about a veteran of the Bay of Pigs Invasion who goes crazy and kidnaps the son of a radical lawyer, had poor commercial prospects.
[4] In response, Simon, who had recently been exploring the works of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald came up with the idea of updating the private-eye genre with a "hip, political, and edgy longhair".
"The Big Fix" focused on the case of an Abbie Hoffman-like radical prankster who attempts to derail the presidential candidacy of a liberal democrat.
[5] Responding to speculation that he had uncovered information related to the killing of Alex Odeh, a regional director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League who had spoken out regarding the takeover of an Italian cruise-ship by Palestinians, Simon said that while he had visited Israel twice and talked to Jews and Arabs in the West Bank, he had not made any inquiries about the case.
"[6] At the start of California Roll, Wine is feeling his age and recovering from a mid-life crisis when he is invited to Silicon Valley by Alex Wiznitsky, a young genius known as the Wiz, who wants him to become head of security for Tulip, a computer company that rose from backstreet obscurity into the Fortune 500 in only three years.
[7] In "The Straight Man" Wine has quit his posh job in corporate security and is back in West Los Angeles where he is half-heartedly doing private detective work from his apartment while trying to cure his mental angst with regular visits to a psychiatrist.
Simon also received story credit on A Better Life, a movie about an undocumented immigrant working as a gardener in Los Angeles while struggling to keep his son away from gangs.
Simon was nominated for an Academy Award for co-writing the screenplay of the 1989 film Enemies, a Love Story based on the novel by Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Simon, a former civil rights activist in the 1960s[citation needed], said he was shocked by "the kind of essential dishonesty to justice" of Simpson's acquittal.
"[10] Simon experienced a political transformation in which he felt alienated from what he saw as the excesses of the Left after the realities of the September 11 attacks affected him.
In 2005 he founded, with jazz guitarist Charles Johnson, webmaster of the Little Green Footballs weblog, a startup company called Pajamas Media.
Simon, with screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, hosts PJTV's "Poliwood" show, covering the intersection of politics and Hollywood.
It was republished in 2011 with additional material under the title Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown In May 2015, Simon began writing the Diary of a Mad Voter blog for PJ Media to cover the presidential election of 2016, interviewing major candidates in print and video.
Born to a Jewish family[12] in New York City on November 22, 1943, Simon is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Yale School of Drama.
He is currently married to Sheryl Longin, who wrote the screenplay for Dick, a film spoof of events in the Watergate political scandal.