Category Archives: Uncategorized

There are very few reasons ever to visit the western suburbs of St Louis. In fact, I can’t think of any – or at least I couldn’t think of any, until Wednesday night, when I had the great good fortune … Continue reading →

Restaurant: Max Meal ordered: Bottle of house rose Fennel salad Lamb ragu Antipasti: My fennel salad was lightly dressed with balsamic vinegar. I could easily taste the fennel which had been finely sliced, it was refreshing and cleansed my palate. … Continue reading →

While I’m in St Louis and notblogging, Michelle’s dining in New York and finding time to write foodblogs. Here’s her first: Right! So my nose has been in Bill Buford’s new book for over a month. My reading is incredibly … Continue reading →

A few months ago, Jack Shafer wrote a story whose subhed ("Spotting a bogus trend story on Page One of today’s New York Times") could probably appear quite a few times on his Slate columns. So I’d like to get … Continue reading →

A man walks into a widget shop with the intention of buying a widget. He picks out a nice widget for $100, but just as he’s about to take it to the counter to pay for it, he gets an … Continue reading →

Liberty Park is back, and much better looking than it was, it must be said. (I know Liberty Park is not its official name. But I’m sure it will no more be called Zuccotti Park than Sixth Avenue is called … Continue reading →

John T Unger left a comment on my last blog about how art makes a terrible investment. No it doesn’t, he said: I’ve found that art makes a great *short-term* investment. I buy what I like, because I want to … Continue reading →

Dad blogs about the TV going away; Mum blogs about the TV coming back. Apparently it was necessary for the World Cup, which means the grown-ups caved before the kids forced them to. Are there no pubs in Berkeley? I … Continue reading →

Eater has it half right: the amazing, wonderful, fabulous, incredible, delicious Snack Dragon Taco Shack on Avenue B and 3rd Street is no longer. The Taco Shack is dead; long live the Taco Shack! For yes, the Snack Dragon Taco … Continue reading →

Things have come to a pretty pass when Apple’s entry-level laptop (which doesn’t even officially support Final Cut Pro and runs it in a slowed-down simulation mode) handily beats a dual-processor G5 desktop machine running Final Cut Pro natively. Me, … Continue reading →

What’s happened to the legendary fact-checkers and copy-editing at the New Yorker? Flicking through this week’s issue, I first stumbled across a reference to USAID in a piece on telenovelas by Hanna Rosin. Now the New Yorker has a thing … Continue reading →

Let’s say there’s a virtually unregulated business, open to all comers in the private sector, in which a state-owned company, which receives subsidies from the state, competes. We all know that state-owned companies are pretty inefficient, so the private sector … Continue reading →

So Californian wines are still the best, say the experts. That’s good news for those of us on budgets. As Mike Steinberger notes, This new Judgment of Paris comes at a time when a large segment of the French wine … Continue reading →

I can’t make head nor tail of the Senate immigration bill. It’s incredibly long, incredibly complicated, and full of references to other bills, making it to all intents and purposes incomprehensible. So I have no idea what I think of … Continue reading →

Hedge fund managers and investors in hedge funds are generally very smart and very sophisticated. They like to talk a lot about risk-adjusted returns, and especially about "alpha" and "beta" – central components of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. And … Continue reading →

Jason Kottke’s found the new New Yorker media kit, and it certainly helps explain why I couldn’t find a copy of the magazine in St Louis. Newsstand circulation is just 46,808, compared to over 1 million subscribers. Looking over the … Continue reading →

We are editors, yes, but we must be writers as well. And sometimes a stylebook ruling or a factual correction conflicts with the goal of presenting prose that sounds as if maybe, just maybe, it was written by a human … Continue reading →

One of the more interesting aspects of the immigration debate is the difference between New York and Los Angeles. Los Angeles, full of immigrants, is split between the Latinos and their supporters, on the one hand, and those who would … Continue reading →

When you’re selling a $3.4 million townhouse in the East Village, you can rest assured your broker will show your place at its very best. Or, you know, not.

I have something of a morning routine: I get myself a cup of coffee and read the A section of the New York Times while waking up. The institutional verbosity of the Times makes my routine more difficult. But most … Continue reading →

When I reviewed An Inconvenient Truth last month, I complained that "it will be far too easy for Republicans to dismiss this film as liberal propaganda." Little did I know. MoveOn has now got into the act, at a webpage … Continue reading →

The interplay of art’s domain and money’s is very complex. The relationship of money to any individual work of art, however, is very simple. There is none. In practice, the culture usually sets a minimum value on works of art, … Continue reading →

I should be careful what I wish for, I guess: when I turned up unannounced on Friday night and asked for a table for four at Chubo, we were told that the restaurant was booked solid. So instead we hopped … Continue reading →

If the New York Times won’t, maybe Google will. I’m talking about pointing to original research: something I’m very interested in with my Report Report Report. (There have been quite a few articles I’ve wanted to write an RRR on, … Continue reading →