Lewis Lazare wrote scathingly last week in the Chicago Sun-Times about the New Yorker’s recent all Target ad issue. “But make no mistake. Target advertising executives must be laughing all the way to the image bank because of the ad placement coup they have pulled off, while New Yorker staffers, […]
Stepping past the entertainers in downtown Northampton, MA on Friday night.
Joshua Clover writes in opposition to Thomas Friedman’s thesis that the world is flat in the Village Voice. “If Friedman’s no global economist, one might expect him to check in with one who works his beat: Fernand Braudel, say, or Giovanni Arrighi, highly regarded “world systems” scholars who study interlocking […]
Peter R made the case against handwashing on errtravel.com. “Let’s assume you wash up before leaving your hotel room. Consider the germs, dirt, cleaning product residues, and other contaminants you probably picked up on your way out of the hotel, getting into and out of the taxi, paying the driver […]
Most are familiar with Hurricane Andrew, which slammed into the Florida coast in 1992. Andrew is the costliest hurricane on record. CBS News reported on this in Sept 2004. “John Gurney of the National Weather Service says, “Hurricane Andrew dwarfs all other storms we’ve had: $26 billion in damage by […]
Amanda Hesser, the NY Times magazine’s food editor, wrote about a trip to Vietnam in Sunday’s paper. “Hoi An, which means “peaceful life union,” is a sleepy place easily traversed on foot. Down an alley off of Phan Boi Chau, we saw a man who stood in the center of […]
Augusten Burroughs is a brilliant writer who lives nearby in Northampton, MA. He wrote a column in this month’s Details magazine about various kinds of f**cks. “Turns out, the day the divorce had become final, Amanda and her now ex-husband had spent the afternoon in bed, in what was now […]
Good news came out of Brazil from the AP yesterday. “The destruction of the Amazon rain forest has slowed dramatically this year, the government said, but environmentalists said it was too soon to celebrate and urged caution with the statistics. Preliminary data indicate that 3,551 square miles of rain forest […]
The number of French vacationers has risen continuously, growing from an estimated 30 percent of the population in 1950 to more than 70 percent in the early eighties, Froidure said. CNN Travel had this sad story in today’s editions. “After stagnating for about two decades, these numbers appear on the […]
The New Yorker’s August 22 ‘all Target ads issue’ included among the creative uses of the red and white bullseye, a look at the sour mood in France by Adam Gopnik. He writes. “When the name “London” was announced, a punch-in-the-stomach silence struck Paris. The French Olympians insisted that the […]
David Utter writes in WebProNews about Amazon’s new Short Story Shorts. “For less than the price of a Coke Zero, customers can purchase short stories by a selection of published authors. It’s an experiment in little payments for little stories. 49 cents will gets the buyer a dozen pages by […]