Sand! Sea! Party!

If your hometown had a font, what would it look like? CitID, an ambitious project from the design firm Norwegian Ink, is trying to answer the question by inviting artists and designers to submit a logo or typeface for “every city worldwide; big or small, rich or poor, famous or infamous, well-known or unheard-of.” Read […]

I Heart Jarvis

Jarvis Cocker, the former frontman of the Britpop band Pulp and a successful solo artist, is the host of “Sunday Service” on BBC 6 Music. The weekly program features selections from Cocker’s record collection—ranging from Bob Dylan to Liberace’s performance of “Moonlight Sonata”—as well as fiction readings and pop-culture discussion. Read more at newyorker.com… Tweet

Shit My Dad Says (the Book)

On August 3, 2009, Justin Halpern—a twenty-eight-year-old comedy writer who had moved back in with his parents following a breakup—started “Shit My Dad Says,” a Twitter feed that documents the musings, philosophical and otherwise, of Halpern’s septuagenarian father, Sam (example: “A parent’s only as good as their dumbest kid. If one wins a Nobel Prize […]

Directions

Because I walk quickly, while wearing sunglasses and headphones, I’m often stopped by tourists in Times Square who need directions. It’s as if my visible, unmistakable barriers to social interaction reveal me to be just the sort of New Yorker who can point you toward Crumbs. To be fair, part of me enjoys being the […]

Ouch

From today’s book section of the New York Times: “Solar,” the new novel by Ian McEwan, is … a book so good—so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off—that it’s actually quite bad. Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it’s impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral. […]

Fine Print

There’s an excellent article by Cynthia Gorney in the New York Times on the possible risks and benefits of estrogen therapy, in particular for women in perimenopause (the year following a final period). I’ve written about the effects of estrogen regarding birth-control pills, but supplemental estrogen as it relates to menopause introduces a new–and possibly […]

Olde-Tymey Vice

Mara L. Keire, a member of the history faculty at the University of Oxford, has made a career out of studying debauchery. Her published works have included “Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” and “The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slavery Scare in the United States, […]