In addition to being a busybody, one Countess Luann de Lesseps, apparently on television, is clearly kind of semantically scrambled. From Page Six: “Men like women to be females,” de Lesseps advised, “to not be like workaholics, as that comes off as being uptight in the bedroom and control freaks.” Awesome. The use of “females” [...]

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There is new art in my office lobby. It is bad art. It is office-lobby art. It is the kind of office-lobby art that makes me wonder if there are factories producing bad art for office lobbies the world over (are there? does anybody know?). Perhaps there is a town in, like, New Hampshire with [...]

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I find the “hook” of beginning things with a blank, blunt phrase and the twee “That’s what Joe thought/Aristotle said/my mom used to believe” construction really irritating. It only just occurred to me that instead of beginning things (things spoken, like papers presented or speeches or things like that–although it might also work with written [...]

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Okay, I’m going to earn my “semiotics of the mundane” badge right off the bat, because I don’t think it gets much more mundane than a close reading of a comment on a blog post about focaccia, sardines, and Williams-Sonoma. Food, I think, is one of the biggest battlegrounds for our collective aesthetics right now [...]

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