I was surprised by the impassioned-- dare I say a wee bit hysterical-- tone of the Ourousoff piece in the Times earlier last week. It was ...

distracted. busy. can't wrap my head around a coherent post. soon. Image: a glimpse from a long ago 42nd street--the inside of this barb...

Thanks to Mr. Trigg at Side Effects I guess I'm "it." 1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages). 2. Open the book t...

I'm surprised I hadn't thought about this before: word aversion (also called " the moist panties phenomenon .") My friend...

Maybe I've become too attuned to 'New New Realism' in photography, fashion and otherwise? The flashlit anti-glamour of Juergen T...

February 8th marks the observance of Harikuyo , Japan's Festival of Broken Needles . A celebration thought to be several hundred years o...

I came across my copy of The City (originally published in 1925) by Frans Masereel. I've had it for years and just recently was moved t...

I recently finished This Republic of Suffering , the new book by Drew Gilpin Faust, about this country's relentless confrontations with ...

A "Talk of the Town" in this past week's New Yorker recounts how Art Garfunkel has kept an index of the 1023 or so books he ...

Somehow I felt like we'd been building toward a Henry Fuseli moment. The Owen Wilson wrist-slashing documentation (where are the scars?)...

Robert Warner 's ephemera collage art show at Pavel Zoubok gallery. A wonderful display of vintage what-not and obscure commercial flots...

Feeling somewhat expansive with the New Year, I've decided to simultaneously look outward from my navel-gazing and be more aesthetically...

Instead of ushering in 2008 with a peevish list of "things I can do without" , I'll leave 2007 with a couple of musical finds...

Postcards of questionable merit. (Not to be confused with a previous Highlight of generic landscape postcards .) Of course I'm being co...

"and many of 'em Perhaps you remember a little song that goes something like this– Pink Bemis" Letterpress card, c. 1930s. A l...

If the Eskimos, as the old saw goes, have a hundred words for "snow," I must have nearly as many for "tired." I'm we...

I just finished a book on neurasthenia, that wonderfully evocative nervous disorder of tremulous aesthetes, profligates, and women (more nex...