I loved the article by Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic about how individuals can fight the panoptic power of CCTV and other surveillance devices just by slathering on some face paint. According to Meyer, “the pixel-calculating machinations of facial recognition algorithms” are thwarted by connivingly applied make up, which transforms one’s f“ace into a mess …
(This first appeared on washingtonmonthly.com on July 6th.) We woke this morning to find that Edward Snowden (Mr. Around the World in Rrrrrrrrrrr! [sound of a screeching stop]) has been offered asylum first in Venezuela, and then in Nicaragua. Perhaps the only person entirely happy about this result may be John Logan, author of the …
At some point in high school, in one of those endless bifurcations people come up with to make sense of society, I realized that all the smart guys at my school could be divided up into two categories–word guys and numbers guys. Both word guys and numbers guys could get good grades in both the …
Here is my new article in Success magazine, about chef Ryan Umane, and the pop up restaurant phenomenon: The intersection of 79th and Third is close to the bull’s-eye center of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, whose residents are as rich, glamorous and well-fed as those of any piece of terra firma. Standing there on a …
We hosted Sandy, the Storm of the Century here this past week, and frankly, we pretty much missed it. Oh, we had impressively high winds that we could see thrashing the trees across the street all day. And yes, we lost phone/cable/internet service for three whole days. But in terms of personal impact, we’ve had …
Found on Facebook, a photo of a couple, Alexis Creque and Russell Murphy, after their arrest last month for allegedly spray-painting a Lower East Side building. An 1980s-era infraction, but the sentiment is au courant.
I LOVE IT!
This is the undefeated cap which my daughter Cara gave me for Christmas. With the magic conjured by the combination of this cap and my head, the Giants beat the Jets and the Cowboys to close out the regular season, and then beat the Falcons, Packers, 49ers and the Patriots to win Super Bowl XLVI. …
The Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, for more than a half century on the premier locations for cabaret in Manhattan, has closed. Prior to its musical incarnation, the Oak Room was famous for being the home of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, where gathered the great witty writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Pictured …