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, [...]

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The Public’s Hamlet at the Delacorte starts off with a bang: it opens with the “to be or not to be” speech. It makes no sense at all (it occurred to me several hours later that it’s possible that the implication is that Hamlet is world-weary even before the action gets going, or perhaps [...]

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I frequently disparage New York Magazine, but there is one thing it does better than any print publication I can think of: It gets the internet. The internet as tastemaker, the internet as cocktail party, the internet as career move and procrastination tool and social obligation, the internet as a force in the lives [...]

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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 [...]

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That was where the people closest to her came in, where, without immodesty, for it was a position I found it almost unbearable to be in, I came in.
This is a very bad sentence. Reading it for the first time, I got mired in the middle, had to yank myself out of its quicksand [...]

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Smart People is not such a smart movie. Though it teeters on the brink of anti-intellectualism, it’s mostly just not so smart. It’s one of these movies about people who hide their feelings in their thinkings, and it’s very clear that feelings are better than thoughts–why, by the end of the movie, hardly [...]

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1) Why squander a theoretically interesting premise (three people get entangled, and they are simultaneously all wrong and all right about what’s going on amongst them) with a climax that simplifies, rather than complicates, the dynamic? Making the wife right all along makes her immediately into a martyr, which she remains for the rest [...]

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