I haven’t been to NYC since Jesus was a corporal, but for some reason I enjoy reading the NYT food coverage. Retiring food critic Frank Bruni has a nice retrospective piece in which he answers questions like “What’s the best sushi?” (Answer: are you willing to drop $400 a person?) and “What’s the best steakhouse?” I would have liked to see more of his greatest hits, such as the classic review of Ninja, but you can’t have everything…
Speaking of the NYT, I have a new blog to watch: The NYTPicker. This looks like it could fill the void left by SmarterTimes and the late lamented J. J. Hunsecker’s Spy column. If they start referring to “bosomy dirty book writer Shirley Lord”, I am there, man.
I feel compelled to say something about Teddles, but I (and probably a dozen other people by now) have already used the “…unavailable for comment” trope. So I’m grudgingly linking to Michael Kelly’s “A Sober Look At Ted Kennedy“. I say grudgingly because the formatting and pagination of this version of the article is horrible. You’d be a lot better off finding and reading a copy of Kelly’s excellent posthumous collection Things Worth Fighting For: Collected Writings
. I’ve read (and recommend) Wallace’s book; the Slate article gives a pretty good short summary of the whole Jefferson’s wines fraud. My opinion is that Wallace doesn’t libel Broadbent; he makes Broadbent look careless, but not criminal.
