Articles in Culture and Criticism
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I forget where I read the article that referred me to the book, but it went straight onto my Amazon wish list — I mean, what a crazy story. A Times reporter gets bounced from …
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Vegas is one of those topics (others include sex and music reviews) that requires as even a writing tone as possible — the less tone of any kind, the better, in fact, because it’s already …
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The Times on the Ramapo tomato’s triumphant return: “When I hear these young chefs gushing about heirlooms, I wonder: haven’t they ever tasted a Big Boy, or an Early Girl?”
The article implies that a big …
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As the champion-foodstuffs bracket prepares to make its triumphant midsummer return with an ice-cream face-off, Keckler and I find ourselves with a few unanswered questions — starting with whether Rocky Road is the same thing …
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Simon Tofield is back, with his cat, in “TV Dinner.” Do not drink hot coffee while watching.You may, however, make fun of me for having the premiere date of Tofield’s latest entered into my Outlook …
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If you’ve ever visited an Ikea, you know that one of the rituals of the trip — along with the sweet reward of meatballs after a deflating hour of comparing countertops, and the despair with …
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Walter Kirn’s zero-Fahrenheit appraisal of James Frey’s new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, is a reviewing masterpiece, opening with a sharp observation about the L.A.-novel genre and building through concisely dismissive observations about Frey’s prose to …
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Last weekend’s heavy rains caused a lot of flooding here at the bottom of the Slope, and the Root Hill Café got hit with heavy inventory losses.The RHC is a nice little place that makes …

Reading The Chris Farley Show immediately after Wired is perhaps not the best idea if the goal is to lighten one’s mood, but I figured, what the hell — I have them both in the …
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I have always had trouble…accessing John Belushi, I guess is the right term.The guy is just not funny to me.A lot of early/”classic” SNL is not funny to me, which stems partly from hearing the …