Category Archives: Widely Spaced Beacons of Hope

Is This Really the Oscars?

We turned on the Oscars by mistake tonight, and we’re actually being entertained!

Kindle’s Killer App

Instapaper is a godsend for Kindle users. I’ve written a couple posts about my search for an application that would make moving web content to the Kindle a simpler process. I have found that application. With Instapaper, you get a little “bookmarklet” (a little button that goes on your browser’s bookmark toolbar or in your

Do I Have a Taste for the Mediocre?

Ever since I bought Silversun Pickups’ latest album, Swoon back in May, I have not been able to stop listening to it, along with their previous album, Carnavas. Swoon rekindled my interest in the latter, which I’d downloaded on a whim from iTunes. Together, the two albums have dominated my listening for two months. But

Trader Joe’s: I Get It–I Think

Danielle calls it the anti-grocery store grocery store. I call it the Place Where We Go to Buy Snacks for Seanzilla That Don’t Have Too Much Corn on the Ingredients List. For a long time I was really fascinated with the idea of Trader Joe’s because it was shrouded in mystery. It was this place

The Unfinished

The New Yorker has a masterful piece on David Foster Wallace and his attempts to write the followup to Infinite Jest. He called the book The Pale King, and Little, Brown is going to publish it in 2010, even though it’s incomplete. D.T. Max’s piece—The Unfinished—answers a lot of questions about Wallace’s final year, covering

passive-aggressive notes

From my friend Nancy, a blog about the hilarious correspondences we share with those we live with, work with, and do business with. Thanks, Nancy! passive-aggressive and just plain aggressive notes — no, your mother doesn’t work here

Diary as Blog, Blog as Diary

The kind folks over at The Orwell Prize have begun a remarkable project: a daily blog post corresponding to George Orwell’s diary entries of 70 years ago. Here’s today’s entry: This morning all surfaces, even indoors, damp as a result of mist. A curious deposit all over my snuff-box, evidently residue of moisture acting on

Book Row: New York Diary, Part 3

Deciding which of New York’s bookstores to visit should not have been difficult. There are a lot of choices—Barnes & Noble, Borders, Housing Works, St. Mark’s, Gotham Book Mart—but the one to see is the one we (kind of) stumbled on: Strand Books. We arrived in the city with a long mental list of potential

Stop All This Ridiculous Mulching Recycling of Books

As publishing moves into the digital future, Jonathan Karp sees the end of disposable books: Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre

Further Proof That Marrying Danielle Was the Best Decision I’ve Ever Made

Angel food cake is one of my favorite things. It’s so simple and good and sweet. I have never contemplated baking it at home. Danielle on the other hand, has made 2 sponge cakes (a lemon sponge cake and the angel food cake) in as many weeks. There’s a story here. First: we’ve had a