This is a thing now?
According to NBC Must-See Thursday it is. First-up on the so-much-greater-than-last-season Parks and Recreation was, oh, the young intern girl in the office. The one who I think was in the latest Judd Apatow. The one with the boyfriend who himself has a boyfriend (hilarious). One of her talk-to-the-camera cutaways involved [...]
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Like yours truly, David Andrew Maddan was the youngest of his siblings. Unlike same, he was an incredibly good swimmer, serving eventually as captain for the UC-Santa Barbara Gauchos swim team. At some point in this swimming tenure, someone gave him the Milnean nickname “Pooh.”
In 2005 doctors found cancer in Pooh’s bones. They diagnosed him [...]
It’s in the Nov 09 Harper’s (pictured, right). The pizzicato paragraph structure, the prose itself, the density of its Bay Area history. It’s incredible:
In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that [...]
I’m writing a course proposal for a class I’m unoriginally calling “Weird Stories”. So: stories that don’t do anything expected or familiar either in terms of form or content. Here are some texts I might use:
Donald Barthelme, “On the Deck”
Lydia Davis, “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman”
Franz Kafka, “The Country Doctor”
Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”
David Foster Wallace, [...]
Did you know that Tesh is kind of a media empire now? From Entertainment Tonight host to Yanni-lite act to syndicated radio host. He’s on before Delilah, I think, on at least two stations in the Omaha/Lincoln broadcasting area.
To differentiate his act from others, Tesh has come up with this factoids-as-public-service bent. “Intelligence for Your [...]
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Does anyone remember how the original U.K. Office came to lead TV comedy in new directions through the force of its genius and novelty? And then the U.S. Office surprised everyone by actually being good through the strength of its performances and the idiosyncrasies of its secondary characters?*
What happened? Jim Loves Pam swelled into this [...]
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Did anyone catch the Magazine’s On Language column? Maybe you heard last week that its longtime columnist, William Safire, died. This week’s is written by Ammon Shea, who recently achieved fame in that newly named genre of annualist nonfiction by reading the OED over the course of a year.
I didn’t make it a habit of [...]
