But would Bruce come? The question echoed, soft but insistent, on the evening of Friday, Sept. 18, in a converted yoga studio on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, N.J. The rock photographer Danny Clinch was celebrating the opening of “Be True,” his first single-subject exhibit: Bruce Springsteen, in his natural habitat. Several hundred people had Read More
Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans By Dan Baum Spiegel & Grau, 335 pages, $26
About halfway through Dan Baum’s brilliant but frustrating Nine Lives, a ventriloquist’s collage of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, Tim Bruneau, a young, strong cop hungry for some “boot-in-the-ass” policing, chases a suspect through the Read More
Mark Bittman, the New York Times food columnist and best-selling cookbook author, was ambling unnoticed through the tight aisles of the Fairway at 74th Street and Broadway on a mild Friday evening earlier this month, shopping for dinner. He nosed briefly around the fish counter before settling on a two-pound slab of monkfish. He had Read More
"It was a slow day and the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road. There was a bright light, a shattering of shopwindows; the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.”
These are the opening lines, the breathtaking Read More
I’m proud to say that I’ve never been thrown out of Shopsin’s General Store. This is due primarily to the fact that I’ve never visited it, neither in its two hallowed West Village nooks nor in its Read More
Had you been asked to assemble the legal team to brief and argue before the Supreme Court a case that would result in "the most important decision on presidential power ever"—as one noted court observer called Hamdan Read More
The only vegan member of Congress, Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), was drifting calmly through Cipriani Wall Street on Saturday, May 17, wearing a patterned bow tie, a gold-embossed flag pin and a strangely youthful glow. “I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in,” said Mr. Kucinich, 61, who stopped eating meat decades ago to combat Read More
On Friday, May 9, counterintuitively lewd comedian Sarah Silverman appeared at Columbia University’s Alfred Lerner Hall in a benefit show for Project A.L.S., which raises money for the study and treatment of a not-very-hilarious neurodegenerative disease. Instead, her monologue evoked an old favorite: starving African children. “I don’t send them money,” Ms. Silverman deadpanned, tugging Read More
Among the vast library of written material produced in the wake of Bruce Springsteen’s three-plus decades of superstardom—biographies, hagiographies, magazine profiles, fan testimonials, academic treatises, lyric exegeses, blog and private journal entries—Greetings From Bury Park may be the first to blame Mr. Springsteen Read More
I ordered lunch today from the go-to Chinese restaurant around the corner from my office. It came in a large plastic bag that held a large paper bag filled with all sorts of containers: a white, microwave-safe Read More
There’s a style of food writing that has proliferated in recent years, a sort of precious, overdone prose that makes me want to scratch my eyeballs out. I love eating food and I love making it. The former Read More
Last month, Kristin Sloan, a comely member of the New York City Ballet, began appearing in a television ad for the iPhone, one in a series of Real People telling slightly implausible stories against a black backdrop. Ms. Sloan’s tale—that she runs a dancers’ blog called The Winger, and sometimes mobile-blogs backstage on her iPhone Read More
So: Welcome!
Shelfari is one of those new social-networking sites that have sprouted like mushrooms at the base of the Read More
At a weekly briefing early in his first term, President Calvin Coolidge noticed a reporter taking notes as he spoke.
“Are you writing down in shorthand what I say?” Coolidge inquired, according to a Read More
The sign said “burpless cucumbers.” I had not noticed that my previous encounters with cucumbers were particularly burp-inducing, so I asked how this variety was different. “They don’t repeat,” the woman at the farm stand said. “The other cucumbers, they repeat in your stomach.” “Repeat?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” she said. “They repeat.” The woman Read More
