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 bookmarks drop-down menu) that, when clicked, grabs the text from the website you’re reading (a story in the New Yorker or a long blog post, whatever) and saves it for later reading.

Later, when you’re ready to spend some time reading and digesting, you surf over to the Instapaper website, and there are all your saved articles. You can either read the text right on the website (it’s very readable once all the obnoxious webpage-y stuff is stripped out), or you can click the little button on the right side of the screen that will download all your saved articles into a nice little Kindle-formatted package. It takes the three or five or 25 articles you’ve saved, formats them for the Kindle’s screen, puts them into one file, and creates a table of contents. You can even create different folders to organize your saved articles before downloading them.

As a bonus, Instapaper has a “Browse” page that lists popular and recommended articles from around the web that you can add to your “Read Later” list.

Brilliant. I’m in love. Screw you iPad.

But I’ve been a little unsettled by the reviews the band has received. They’re the sort of “this band is competent and easy on the ears…but…” reviews that music critics love to write about popular bands.

Every review compares them to the Smashing Pumpkins in a dismissive way I find really annoying. The Pumpkins are an obvious influence, but all bands have influences. All bands—all musicians—build on the music has come before.

I find both albums really easy to listen to. Over and over. There’s depth and dynamism here. There are layers. And maybe it’s because they’re bringing back a sound I’ve missed in alt rock (namely, a grungy, buzzy, guitar-driven sound), but I can’t stop loving this music. It has none of the too-precious, ironic and inaccessible pretentiousness of the favorites over at Pitchfork.

So maybe I have mediocre taste in music, or maybe I’m just drawn to stuff that strikes a chord (sorry) in my fond memories of growing up grunge.

Or maybe this is just fucking good music, and maybe the critics need to get over themselves.

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 that had shelves full of presumably really great products for all the cool kids who lived in cooler cities than mine. They bought everything from canned soup to bulk nuts to beer at Trader Joe’s, and I had never been in one. I felt so excluded!

But then one night in Ann Arbor I rode along with my friend Luke in his law school Honda Accord, which was one of the first things to go when he was hired by a law firm in Washington, D.C., to buy chocolates and beer. I was so excited to finally be going to a Trader Joe’s!

But it was anticlimactic! It was a grocery store!

It wasn’t a small little shop with lots of interesting gourmet food items on nice shelves beneath incandescent lights. It was a grocery store with a whole bunch of Trader Joe’s-branded foodstuffs.

So I kind of forgot about it, secure in the knowledge that I wasn’t missing out on anything too awesome.

It would take a year for me to understand the hype. A TJ’s (to use the diminutive favored by fans of the chain) opened in Warwick last fall, and we’ve popped in a few times since then. Again, the first time, I didn’t feel the excitement. I saw a lot of what appeared to be prepared and frozen foods, and that was it.

I should have read the labels.

When you compare the ingredients list on a box of TJ’s cereal bars to that on a box of NutriGrain bars, for example, you’ll notice something interesting: no high-fructose corn syrup in the TJ’s version. The ingredients are, on the whole, simpler.

The other key is price (of course). Organic items abound, and their prices are significantly lower than what we find at our local grocery store—and way lower than Whole Foods. They didn’t get the nickname “Whole Paycheck” for nothing.

So there it is: for all of us trying to heed the cry of Michael Pollan and eat a diet of foods we can recognize as actual food, Trader Joe’s is a great place to be.

Because sometimes you just need organic miniature peanut butter sandwich crackers.

D.T. Max’s piece—The Unfinished—answers a lot of questions about Wallace’s final year, covering some of the same territory as David Lipsky’s piece in Rolling Stone, but it also offers new insights and details, especially with regard to the new book, and Wallace’s difficulties with it.

An excerpt—Wiggle Room—appears in the same issue. This will have to suffice until the rest of it comes out next year.

I don’t even know if it really matters that it’s unfinished. DFW had a tendency to leave his work unresolved, anyway. You take what he gives you. And he gave more than most.

passive-aggressive and just plain aggressive notes — no, your mother doesn’t work here

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 lacquer.

Very hot, but rain in afternoon.

Am told the men caught another snake this morning – definitely a grass snake this time. The man who saw them said they had tied a string round its neck & were trying to cut out its tongue with a knife, the idea being that after this it could not “sting.”¹

The first Beauty of Bath apples today.

Fantastic. I love the attention to detail rather than style. It is simply a record. And that’s the difference between keeping a diary and blogging. Unless you’re a bit of a megalomaniac, you’re not writing your diary so that it can be read by other people.

We arrived in the city with a long mental list of potential things to do/see. These included: the Guggenheim, the Met, the MoMA, the Apple Store, Ground Zero, FAO Schwartz, Union Square Market, one of the above bookstores, Central Park, and a ‘real New York pizza parlor.’ Obviously, we couldn’t do everything, so we decided on a couple things each day and let serendipity take care of the rest, which is how we typically tackle a new place when we travel.

As it happened, on Wednesday morning (our second day), after visiting Union Square Market, Danielle spotted a young woman with a Strand Books tote and asked her if it was close by. It was: just one block over and one block down.

It didn’t look like ‘18 miles of books’ from the outside, but, inside, it was immediately clear where George Will first came up with the original phrase, which was ‘8 miles of books.’

Once inside we had to check our bags, and then we were off. Danielle and Sean and I quickly got separated—thankfully, Danielle and Sean were together! I wandered amongst the display tables and found one marked ‘The Strand 80.’ A Strand employee was standing nearby, so I asked him if these books were supposed to be the 80 books everyone should read. ‘Oh, not necessarily,’ he said. ‘They’re the books our customers voted for. In fact, some of them probably shouldn’t be read by anyone.’ I looked over the selections. They included The DaVinci Code. ‘That explains this,’ I said, holding up Dan Brown’s 300 pages of monkey doo-doo. He said, ‘That’s certainly one of the ones we’re ashamed of.’

After browsing around and assuring myself that there was far too much to take in during just one visit, I loitered around the front of the store until Danielle and Sean found me. We each chose a book (I picked out The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Danielle picked out The Zombie Survival Guide) and picked out T-shirts, the only souvenirs we brought home. Oh, except for the Starbucks New York mug. And the Zabar’s mug.

Places like the Strand are almost enough to make me consider living there one day.

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 fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it’s hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.

Publishers mulch/recycle an absurd number of books every year that the retail chains can’t sell (in the book business, if you order a product and can’t sell it, you can return it to the publisher for a full refund). It’s extraordinarily wasteful, especially when you consider how many books are published every year in this country.

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 lot of farm fresh eggs to use. Second: we had a little issue with some strawberries. In our attempt to find things to do with the strawberry syrup, we decided to have a go at homemade ice cream, or, to be more accurate, frozen custard, which uses about 8 egg yolks. So, what could we do with the 8 egg whites that were left over? There was a time, when our lives were busier, when we would have just slopped them down the drain. But now, since we both work from home and have the time, Danielle knew just what to use the egg whites for (see above).

The strawberry folly was a collaborative effort, with a yummy result. The angel cake was all Danielle, and all delicious. Tonight, for dessert, in keeping with her tendency to flaunt the rules of nature and decency, she handed me a bowl that contained a piece of cake, topped with a scoop of ice cream, topped with a spoonful of strawberry syrup.

We transcended time and space.