Monthly Archives: May 2006

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 →

Alex Tabarrok today (in an article on which comments are closed): Since Galbraith wrote, for example, the number of privately owned communities has exploded. Today some 55 million Americans live in a private community, many of which provide their own … Continue reading →

Pogue’s Posts now comes with a full RSS feed. DealBook, Asimov, Bruni, however – still broken.

Greg Allen looks at the auctions in much the same way I did, only instead of Ryman vs Irwin, he uses Nara vs Smithson. As ever, the real money is in paintings. A handful of trophy sculptors (Koons, Hirst, Cattelan) … Continue reading →

So this season’s contemporary art auctions have come and gone: $143 million at Christie’s, $129 million at Sotheby’s. Sotheby’s wins the Best Quote Award, however: Tobias Meyer, director of contemporary art for Sotheby’s worldwide and the evening’s auctioneer, called the … Continue reading →

So here’s the deal. The King James Bible, The Wizard of Oz, and the UN Secretariat building in New York are all magnificent, towering achievements on an artistic level. Can you imagine a "Bible as Literature" class based on the … Continue reading →

This is what has become of Lot 61, the club that made Amy Sacco. The rear of the puddle on the floor more or less corresponds to where the wall behind the front bar used to be. It all looks … Continue reading →

A quick quiz for anybody who’s not Todd Gibson. What connects: The King James Bible The Wizard of Oz (the movie, not the book) The UN Secretariat building in New York? A special treat to whomever is first with the … Continue reading →

Subaru’s jump in March sales was, says, the company, because consumers are responding to our new campaign, ‘It’s What Makes a Subaru, a Subaru.’ Yes, that comma is there, always – in the print ads, in the television ads, in … Continue reading →