September 2011
15 posts
5 tags
The Hunt for Hemingway →
You can make me jealous—and you can hurt most awfully—’cause my loving you is a chink in the armour of telling the world to go to hell and you can thrust a sword into it at any time.
6 tags
Portrait of the artist: Scott Avett →
“…they may pay us off in fame/ Though that is not why we came.”
3 tags
The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved →
“Fuck England,” I said. “This is Middle America. These people regard what you’re doing to them as a brutal, bilious insult.”
4 tags
The Most Emailed 'New York Times' Article Ever →
Anna takes José Saramago’s paw in her hands and whispers in his ear. He taps the iPad and the web browser opens. José Saramago gives a little yelp.
5 tags
Darwin, the Market Whiz →
As Darwin saw, many important aspects of life are graded on the curve, and in such cases, individual incentives often lead to mutually offsetting efforts.
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The Shame of College Sports →
For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence — “amateurism” and the “student-athlete” — are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of...
6 tags
The Journalist and the Spies: The murder of a... →
“I used to be a brave journalist,” Sheikh told me one day as we rode in a car across the Punjabi plains. “But I will be frank with you. I don’t want to get killed like Saleem. I don’t want to suffer like Saleem did. So I’m not part of the war anymore. I am just writing stereotypical bullshit stories—and no one is angry.”
5 tags
Why They Get Pakistan Wrong →
Perhaps the vast majority of Pakistanis with an unfavorable view of the United States simply believe their annual free pizza is not worth the price of a conflict that claims the lives of thousands of their fellow citizens each year.
4 tags
Should We Fight to Save Indie Bookstores? →
Do I want to save my favorite indie bookstores? Indeed I do. Should we save them (must we save them)? I throw that question to the ether.
3 tags
Goodbye to All That →
It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.
4 tags
Arsène Wenger: the blinkered visionary →
As the pressure on Arsenal’s talismanic manager grows, even his supporters fear his famed singleness of purpose has turned into intransigence.
4 tags
Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard →
Hamlet didn’t get arrested. He’s prince. He can kill anybody he wants. So he goes along, and finally he gets in a duel, and he’s killed. Well, did he go to heaven or did he go to hell? Quite a difference. Cinderella or Kafka’s cockroach? I don’t think Shakespeare believed in a heaven or hell any more than I do. And so we don’t know whether it’s good news or bad news.
5 tags
Fresh and Direct From the Garden an Ocean Away →
“On the whole, there are lots more winners than losers from the Columbian Exchange,” Mr. Mann said. “I don’t want to tell Italians they can’t have tomatoes, or people in Sichuan they can’t have peppers.
4 tags
'I really regret it. I really regret having... →
The word is merdeuf. French speakers recognize it instantly as a contraction of mère de famille, the traditional phrase for a full-time mother, a housewife, a woman who makes mothering her career. But the contraction turns it into something that sounds like a combination of merde and oeuf, carrying the implication that these patriotic mega-moms are “egg-shitters.”
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How to make an intelligent blockbuster and not... →
If you don’t believe me, ask yourself this question: “Was Pearl Harbor a hit?” The answer, obviously, ought to be a resounding “No”. For, as even the lowliest of amoebic life forms can tell you, that film was shockingly poor in ways it is almost painful to imagine. For one thing, it is “un film de Michael Bay”, the reigning deity of all that is loathsome,...
