2010
You are browsing the archive for 2010.
The little boy in this photo might be my brother, or it might just be some random kid. (I found it in a pile my parents were throwing out, in an attempt to get rid of some extraneous stuff.) Which is more interesting?
In this piece, Jessa really gets at the impossibility of reading the “right” books all the time:
The idea that as a literary person there are a certain set of books you must read because they are important parts of the literary conversation is constantly implied, yet quite ridiculous. Once you get done with the Musts [...]
My favorite recent thing: The Believer’s amazing interview with Robin Nagle, who holds the enviable position of anthropologist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation. “My entry point is through things we decide are no longer worth keeping,” she explains.
Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything. So we are surrounded by ephemera, but [...]
The last of the tomatoes are coming in now, wide and cracked, heavy with the captured humidity of passing summer, each one a Neruda poem shedding its own light, benign majesty. It is time to eat them, these sunsets of the season, then put away our flip-flops and face the fall.
Dear Sam Sifton: You are [...]
And now for today’s accounting of things that are dead or otherwise over: Paste magazine. Heeb magazine. Felicity Merriman, the Revolutionary War-era American Girl doll (once owned and beloved by my childhood friend Joanna, whose mother wouldn’t buy her a doll tied to a more recent historical period because it wouldn’t have been educational enough). [...]
Today’s best headline: “‘Cougar’ Trend of Women Chasing Younger Men a Myth.”
You don’t say.
The glut of 90’s-centric fashion has finally led the Times to an obvious source of influence: Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes, wearing all those poufy floral patterned dresses, often paired with jackets and boots. Writer William Van Meter thinks her look incorporated a range of styles, including “early American settler, gypsy, business casual, pious [...]
Look, I love Mad Men. LOVE. And I’m willing to buy that Matthew Weiner is some kind of genius. But I’m getting kind of sick of reading interviews with the cast that repeatedly invoke the show’s creator like he is some kind of oracle, you know? It starts to seem like they are all brainwashed.