Category Archives: Not economics

and even the Gawker commenters are snark-free. A truly great loss, and a very sad day.

The war in South Ossetia is a great example of the power of blogging. On Friday, which was pretty much the day it started, Doug Muir posted a generally anti-Georgian explanation of the whole thing, while Svante Cornell posted a … Continue reading →

I had a little holiday last month, and discovered what might well be the greatest food city in the world: San Sebastian. Just, wow. The jamon iberico on the beach was, far and away, the greatest ham I’ve ever eaten … Continue reading →

Matty’s cell rang. “Excuse me,” half turning away. “Got a pen?” It was his ex. “Yup.” Making no move to find one. “Adirondack Trailways 4432, arriving Port Authority, four-fifteen tomorrow.” “A.m. or p.m.?” “Guess.” “All right, whatever,” glancing at Billy. … Continue reading →

I wish I’d known this years ago… Point your brower to about:config. Where it says “Filter” at the top, type in “resize”. Or just scroll down to “dom.disable_window_move_resize”. It probably says “false”. Right-click on it, and select “toggle”. Now it … Continue reading →

I’ve started writing a monthly column on art collecting for Poder, a magazine in Miami. Here are the first four. I love the art direction on them, it makes a refreshing change from the blog format. The Lion’s Share: A … Continue reading →

A curious postscript to the post below: both the NYT and Slate have slide shows about the Murakami show. Both of them talk about 727-727, and attempt to illustrate it, on slide 10 of the NYT slideshow, and slide 8 … Continue reading →

I went to the Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum last night, it’s well worth seeing. For me, the highlight is the painting above, 727-727, which unfortunately just doesn’t work very well in reproduction. In real life, it’s enormous … Continue reading →

On one’s first trip to Marfa, the tour of Chinati is revelatory enough that you don’t get too annoyed by the restrictions. On one’s second trip to Marfa, the fact that you’re shepherded out of Judd’s masterpiece so that you … Continue reading →

Liesl Gibson: Best doctor ever!

Last year, I extolled the virtues of listening to new-music pieces more than once. Yesterday, I went to Carnegie Hall to hear the new Doctor Atomic Symphony by John Adams, and it was wonderful; but it was also very dense … Continue reading →

After flicking through the wine list at Cafe Gray on Friday night, I’ve come up with what I’m calling the Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio, or RPR. The formula is simple: RPR=W/E W is what you might call the quarter-median wine price: … Continue reading →

I am so losing my bet. Thanks to Tom Cruise, Gawker is going to easily set a new record for pageviews this month. Remember that the old record was 11.5 million pageviews in the month of October; Gawker got 5.3 … Continue reading →

I’m not receiving any email at my felixsalmon.com address, for some reason. If you need to reach me, my temporary email address is felix.salmon at gmail. Email back up. Crisis over.

I’m quoted* in Allen Salkin’s NYT article on Gawker tomorrow. I thought that he’d place more emphasis on the importance of Gawker’s commenters for generating pageviews, since we talked quite a lot about that, but I guess Sunday Styles doesn’t … Continue reading →

Nick Denton has for some time been goosing Gawker’s pageviews by encouraging long comments threads on Gawker posts. There’s nothing wrong with that, and Gawker’s comments system is excellent. But it turns out that even Gawker’s loyal commenters will exit … Continue reading →

I watched the New Hampshire debates last night, the first debates I’ve watched this election season. (I would have watched more, I’m sure, but for the fact that I don’t have a television.) And after watching first the Republicans and … Continue reading →

Merry Christmas to you. As for me, all I want for Christmas is… …a very simple WYSIWYG HTML editor. Why can’t I find one? I spend most of my days writing blog entries. Mostly it’s just text inside <p> tags, … Continue reading →

Last night, a dozen or so friends and I discovered one of the best-value wines in America. I’ll tell you what it is in a minute. But first, it’s worth explaining how we came to that conclusion: Michelle and I … Continue reading →

Details here. In a nutshell, Zipcar bought Flexcar, and adopted Flexcar’s insurance policies. Hooray!

Sometimes I need to restart my iPhone. No big deal, it’s a computer, computers need to be restarted once in a while. But for some reason, when that happens, all my photos get wiped. Not the songs on the iPod, … Continue reading →

Megan McArdle is smarter than I am – or she knows more, at least. Apparently she got 60 out of 60 questions right on this quiz; I got 50 out of 60 and was pleased with that. I blame the … Continue reading →

A tourist mother was overheard in the lobby of the MetLife building telling her daughter that it was a train station. This is something which could only happen in America. I love US train stations, especially the grand ones along … Continue reading →

Steve Jobs is giving me $100! Thanks, Steve! I’m happy about this: my $499 iPhone has now essentially become a $399 iPhone, which is a very attractive price indeed. True, the real $399 iPhone has twice the capacity of mine. … Continue reading →