Can’t keep your New Year’s resolutions? Maybe it’s a matter of brainpower, not willpower.
Archive for December, 2009
Blame it on the brain
Thursday, December 31st, 2009Skinny legs and all
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009I haven’t really read Maureen Dowd’s columns much over the past ten years, but it’s nice to know someone has taken the time to catalog her pop-culture references and then consider why a show that went off the air less than two years into the decade makes the list. Because it’s Ally Mc-fucking-Beal! Only the best show on television ever to feature a skinny, klutzy girl with a messed-up dating life who insists on wearing miniskirts throughout Massachusetts winters.
Really, how many other hour-long dramedies could provoke a young (and miniskirted) writer to furiously pen a column that posits, “Feminists can have nice legs, too”?
The “archivist of death”
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009I love to read the obituaries, a peculiar pleasure, I know, for someone far from retirement age. But I’m fascinated by the lives people lived, both those notable enough to be catalogued in year-end memorials and those quietly led.
But here’s someone far more dedicated to the obits than I, a real archivist of the dead (hat tip: Post Mortem). It’s a lovely listen.
My Tai’d
Monday, December 28th, 2009The place: A small northern New England town on Christmas, nearing midnight. Four thirty-something high-school classmates sitting in a bar shoehorned in the back of a threadbare Chinese restaurant, where the occasional flaming-volcano bowl is the last vestige of a brassy past. The reunited schoolmates are The Gimlet Eye, her senior-prom date, a boy she once kissed who — thankfully, given the discomfort of said kiss — turned out to be gay, and a formerly unapproachable tortured-poet sort. Looking around, they realise they know none of the carousing twenty-somethings (actual dialogue: “I am the king — the king – of fighting.”) in the bar.
The debate: Is it a good thing that, unlike their contemporaries, they are single, unencumbered professionals able and inclined to engage in late-night holiday drinking? Or is it sad that they don’t have deeper ties and obligations?
And now, from the paper that brought you Watergate…
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009Thank God the Post is putting its investigative-reporting prowess to use…on the Salahis? I like my journalism with a side of frivolity occasionally but really?
Byrd brained
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009Jeez. “Sen. Robert Byrd, Invalid-W.Va.?” That just seems gratuitously nasty.
Look, I don’t have any problem with the Republicans invoking procedural rules to force Byrd and the other 99 senators to show up and vote. And having closely covered the man for a number of years — closely as in, he’s met my mom — I’d be willing to say that neither does he. The man has had three great loves: his late wife Erma, his late dog Billy, and the Senate.
“Mad” economics
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009Edward Glaeser has a Creative Class-esque take on Mad Men in today’s Times: that the intellectual value of proximity draws idea-driven industries to cluster close to urban cores.
Personally, I don’t watch Mad Men much for the economics. Bigger draws: the fashion, the design, John Slattery. But it’s an interesting prism through which to see the show, and the industry on which it focuses.
Still, as one of the commenters on Glaeser’s blog notes, will being electronically connected dilute the significance of cities in an idea economy?
The Senate: Is a body of white men anti-tan?
Sunday, December 20th, 2009Forget about the abortion provisions — the Times reports that the health-care bill contains a new tax on fake-and-bake indoor tans:
Mr. Reid dropped a proposed tax on cosmetic surgery and replaced it with a tax on “indoor tanning services.” Senate Democrats said the 10 percent tax was justified because ultraviolet radiation from tanning devices could increase the risk of skin cancer.
Where was the pro-melanin lobby on this debate?! And more critically, will this tax be levied on my Mystic tan?
Expense-account dining (not mine)
Sunday, December 20th, 2009I wish I had something clever to say about the soft-poached egg at Plume at the Jefferson Hotel, but all I’ve got is…mmm.
Demured my way into a dinner invite there a week ago, and Tom Sietsema’s review made me hungry all over again.
Let’s get cooking…
Friday, December 18th, 2009Not cool: Condé Nast shuttering Gourmet.
Cool: New York University purchasing Gourmet‘s 3,500-volume cookbook collection to add to its extensive culinary library.