You may or may not be aware that I keep a (lazy, rarely updated, soon-to-be-revived for a special project) photo collection of umbrella carcasses that litter the streets of New York–late victims of their shoddy construction and the wildly whipping wind, and a useful symbol of both consumer culture generally and of the bandaid-on-a-gunshot-wound lifestyle [...]
So, remember how my dad got a Smart Car?
He has upped the adorable ante again and a. joined a Houston-area auto club and social-networking site for Smart Car owners, and b. taken some tasteful photographs of the tiny car basking in the sun in a roadside field of wild bluebonnets, as does every doting Texan [...]
Maltese Puppies For Sale
America’s Best- And Worst-Paying Jobs
Katie Holmes Is Afraid of the Dark
Yogurt Tartlets
10 Ways to Get a Good Night’s Sleep
St. Louis Cardinals place outfielder Rick Ankiel on disabled list after collision with wall
How to Start a New Garden
Books I read (rather, finished) in 2008, organized autobiographically:
A History of Old Age, Pat Thane
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans
Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris
In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian [...]
Grocery shopping in New York, Brooklyn specifically, is its own special slice of hell. Every store (of which there are surprisingly few) is dusty, overpriced, understocked, and expects you to tip its severely and illegally underpaid but very sweet old Mexican grocery baggers. It’s true that there is now a wonderful Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn [...]
Relevant: we’ve just finished work on a book that collects classic portraits from the pages of Vanity Fair, along with essays on those portraits, a summary of the history of the magazine, and the following poem. Written by Dorothy Parker about her time as a VF staff writer, the poem is titled “Our Office: [...]
I’m working in my blissfully empty-ass office today, Saturday, and as such I’m not paying for my lunch. I ordered sushi from a midtown restaurant called Haru, and the blurb on the front of the menu is so over-the-top broken that I’m not sure how it was ever allowed to have been mass-produced and dropped [...]
So, kind of drunk at work. My boss took me to what ended up being a $200 lunch to sort of celebrate that I am his assistant and I am the best at that particular thing and he is glad that I don’t mind when he goes to Mexico for a week leaving me to [...]
Dear Telepathe and the guy from Black Dice,
So, I just paid the New Museum ten crisp dollars to sit in a stackable wooden chair and stare at the looping video behind your heads. I have not had strong feelings about music or performance generally in a strangely long time*, and to be fair, I subjected [...]
