I’VE BEEN THERE WITH THIS GUY...

Huzzahs to the New York Times –an American institution I adore despite the widespread Murdochian bloodlust for its demise–for breaking, first, the news of Eliot Spitzer’s link to the Emperor’s Club, and, second, the identity of “Kristen.� BUT: Was it really necessary to denigrate young Ashley Youmans’s sample song on her MySpace page as “an amateurish, hip-hop-inflected rhythm-and-blues tune� that uses “dated slang, calling someone her ‘boo’�? Such unwarranted Rock S... more

Sometimes the YouTube time-machine experience disappoints; the retrieved televisual artifact of one’s childhood isn’t as pleasing or outré as memory promised. But in the case of the infamous New York Rangers “Ooh, la la, Sasson� commercial of 1979 (featuring Phil Esposito, left , and the fabulous Ron Duguay), the experience is even better than what memory promised. The YouTuber comments that appear below the video are the usual homophobic, subliterate vitriol, but I ... more

This week in New York City, the Mitzvah Tanks are out in full force. They’re RVs tricked out by the Chabad-Lubabitch Hasidim to function as mobile synagogues and places where lapsed Jewish-Americans can reconnect with traditional, felt-hatted Judaism. As a child, I remember being traumatized when, walking down the main street of my small town in New Jersey, I was ambushed by two Hasids in the full regalia, who said “Hey! Hey! Sonny! Does your mother kindle the Sabbath lights on Friday nig... more

Writer and acclaimed food-person Michael Ruhlman has for the last five months featured an elegantly composed homepage photo on his Web site that hits many of the marks of Food Snobbery as portrayed in the humor book I wrote with Marion Rosenfeld, The Food Snob’s Dictionary . We have definitions in the book for some of the things pictured–the chinois strainer, the Le Creuset pot, the All-Clad pot–and we only wish that the copper pots in Ruhlman’s kitchen had been picked up by him duri... more