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Now, For $35, An Insider's Access To Hot tables
by Kim Severson, New York Times
People who go out to eat in New York can be divided in plenty of ways, but the division that matters most is this: You are either someone who can get a great table on a Saturday night, or you're not. Now there is help for those who can't.

With This Ring, I Thee Bed
by Essie Carmichael, Village Voice
My husband and I used to have sex once a day. Then we got married. But this is not a sad story; it's a happy story. I hope.

The Readers Strike Back
by Gary Kamiya, Salon
Massive online feedback has rocked writers and changed journalism forever. This brave new world is filled with beautiful minds and nasty Calibans and everything in between. Its benefits are undeniable. But do they outweigh its insidious effects?

Google's Moon Shot: The Quest For The Universal Library
by Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker
Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google.

Wear Your Heart On Your Sleeves
by Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian
In the days before iTunes, when you wanted to impress a girl you lovingly put together a compilation tape from your LPs. Now — thanks to the wondrous choice of digital music — mix tapes and vinyl are dying out. But is some of the mystery and meaning of music also disappearing?

Awash In Words: Why The SAT Makes Lousy Shower Reading
by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post
One of the great traditions and cultural hallmarks of Western civilization is reading in the bathroom. In my house, this has taken on a dramatic new element with the acquisition of a shower curtain filled with 500 common SAT words. Santa Claus brought it as a lovely Christmas present for a teenager who understands that her societal worth and the honor of her family hinge entirely on her SAT score.

Unhappy Meals
by Michael Pollan, New York Times
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing questions of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I'm tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words.

An Oenophile And His Money: Is Any Bottle Of Wine Worth $700?
by Mike Steinberger, Slate
This is a story about a bottle of wine. A very expensive but also very delicious bottle of wine — a wine that so captivated me when I first tasted it that I immediately resolved to taste it again. What followed was an almost two-year odyssey that tested the limits of my resourcefulness and perhaps also expressed the warping effect that wine has had on my brain.

For The High-End Bathroom, Something Unexpected
by Suzanne Gannon, New York Times
Among the features of the new 6,000-square-foot, $3 million entertainment wing in Kevin Scherer's home in Plano, Tex., are two bars, a theater, a video game room, a shuffleboard table and a golf simulator that projects images of top courses onto a big screen. Oh, and a urinal.

Women In Love: On patty Marx, Christopher Hitchens, And Funny Women
by Laura Kipnis, Slate
Life is long and the world is small — so much so that you occasionally encounter one of your former boyfriends turning up as a tinly disguised character in one of his previous girlfriend's satiric novels.

Girl, Interrupted: The Power To Shrink Human Beings
by William Saletan, Slate
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Ashley. And she stayed little forever. It's a true story.

A Librarian's Lament: Books Are A Hard Sell
by Thomas Washington, Washington Post
Literacy today is defined less by how English departments or a librarian might teach Wordsworth or Faulkner than by how we find our way through the digital forest of information overload.

Of Thought And Metaphor
by Peter Calamai, Toronto Star
Asking Steven Pinker, Harvard researcher and best-selling author, to pass the salt turns out to be very educational. Not about sodium and high blood pressure, but about how we use language and what that reveals about human nature.

Astonish Me
by Joe Queenan, New York Times
No one was more excited than I was when Maureen Corrigan of National Publc Radio's "Fresh Air" described Alice McDermott's new novel as "astonishing." Several years ago, overwhelmed by the flood of material unleashed annually by the publishing industry, I decided to establish a screening program by purchasing only books that at least one reviewer had described as "astonishing."

The Search For Beautiful
by Anupreeta Das, Boston Globe
Cosmetic surgery is no longer just for white women. Now recrod numbers of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanics are lining up for a nip here, a tuck there. Are they chasing a Caucasian ideal of beauty? Or are they aiming for racial and ethnic ambiguity?

A Home, No Matter How Humble: What Happens When The Housing Crunch Leaves You Out Entirely?
by Colin Asher, San Francisco Chronicle
Typically, San Francisco's 20,000 single-room occupancy units are between 100 and 200 square feet. Bathrooms are dormitory style, and there may be only one per floor. Most buildings have no cooking facilities, forcing residents to eat out or cook in microwave ovens. Despite these paltry accommodations, rent on most SRO units is relatively high — ranging from $500 to $1,000 per month. Because SRO hotels don't typically require security deposits or run credit checks, they are the only housing option for thousands of San Francisco's poorest residents.

The World Is Watching. Not Americans.
by A. O. Scott, New York Times
The movies are out there, more numerous and various than ever before, but the audience — and therefore the box-office returns, and the willingness of distributors to risk even relatively small sums on North American distribution rights — seems to be dwindling and scattering.

Featherhood
by James Sullivan, Boston Globe
After almost four decades on Sesame Street, Caroll Spinney — the man who brings Big Birad and Oscar the Grouch to life — still has a spring in his giant step.

The Sound And The Fury
by Noah Marcel Sudarsky, New York Times
Night life and noise are always a fraught topic in the city, but they are particularly so now. An overhaul of the city's noise code, the first in more than 30 years, will take effect on July 1. Moreover, in light of the growth of bars in gentrifying areas and the spillover of smoking patrons onto sidewalks because of the no-smoking laws, officials are taking a close look at night-life regulation.

Looking For My Father In Las Vegas
by Pat Jordan, New York Times
My father never worked a day in his life. He was a gambler and a con man and a grifter for all of the 65 years that I knew him. He gambled on pool, cards, dice, horses, sports events, two ipgeons sitting on a fence, anything — as long as he could find an edge.

Walking All Over Fashion
by Syl Tang, Financial Times
Although many interesting and salient facts may be gleaned from tourist brouchures, one of the more esoteric has to be that included in a new informational pamphlet for visitors to Rome. There, apparently, the very latest thing is to war two completely different shoes.

Clearly, You Must See The Humor In High-Def Television
by Kevin Cowherd, Baltimore Sun
If you're looking for cheap, easy entertainment — and who isn't these days? — here's something that's always a hit.

How Cinema Lost Its Soul
by Ronald Bergan, The Independent
From Bunuel to Warhol, film used to be thrillingly experimental, but now we have to look to other art forms for the avant-grade.

In New 'Quality TV,' Dark Is New Light: CSI-ing Of America
by Ron Rosenbaum, New York Observer
Darkness has become a signifier for deepness, for deep seriousness — most often a substitute for it, alas.

What's Wrong With Vocational School?
by Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal
Too many Americans are going to college.

The Food Connection
by Karla Cook, New York Times
Many manages to find good food through a mixture of effort, serendipity, research and connectivity — whether to the web, a hand-held device with a comprehensive database, or by word of mouth. But sometimes there is more to the equation than just the food, especially for business travelers on their own.

Doodles A La Carte
by Caroline H. Dworin, New York Times
At the aptly named Pergola des Artistes, New Yorker cartoonists dined and dished on Tuesday at their weekly lunch. Every topic is on the table, including the pronounciation of the name of the 46th Street restaurant.

A Silver Of A Storefront, A Faith On The Rise
by David Gonzalez, New York Times
Storefront churches have become part of the streetscape in New York and around the globe in recent decades. Tiny and makeshift, they sprout up almost overnight, wedged in among the bodegas and takeout counters.

The Art Of Being Shamless
by Chrystia Freeland, Financial Times
I suspect that part of the reason self-promotion makes some of us cringe is the lovely belief that if something is really good, it will naturally find an audience. But a recent study of what creates a cultural hit by Columbia University sociologists Matthew Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds and Duncan Watts suggests what I have always feared: "Success was only partly determined by quality."

Newspapers... And After?
by John Nichols, The Nation
The dinosaurs still have enough life in them to guide — and perhaps even define — our politics.

For $7.93 An Hour, It's Worth A Trip Across A State Line
by Timothy Egan, New York Times
Just eight miles separate this town on the Washington side of the state border from Post Falls on the Idaho side. But the towns are nearly $3 an hour apart in the required minimum wage.

The Copycat Syndrome
by Meghan O'Rourke, Slate
Plagiarists at work.

A Trough At The Theater - To Chow Or Not To Chow?
by John Heilpern, New York Observer
Why can't America stop eating for two hours?

The Breakfast Wars
by Julia Moskin, New York Times
Even as Starbucks has developed a mass following for its dark, super-roasted coffee and its iced, frothed, blended and flavored offspring, the company has struggled to get its food up to par.

Seven Rules For Reading The Paper
by Garrison Keillor, Salon
Newspapers are portable, disposable and convey a certain savoir faire. Follow these easy steps, and you'll be leaving your laptop behind.

Stern Likes His New Censor: Himself
by Jacques Steinberg, New York Times
Howard Stern, who today marks his first anniversary on satellite radio, wasted little time over that period before settin goff on an expedition deep into the wild, forested territories of a medium patrolled by neither the Federal Communications Commission nor, apparently, his own employer.

Getting It All Wrong
by Brian Boyd, The American Scholar
We love stories, and we will continue to love them. But for more than 30 years, as Theory has established itself as "the new hegemony in literary studies" (to echo the title of Tony Hilfer's cogent critique), university literature departments in the English-speaking world have often done their best to stifle this thoroughly human emotion.

Jazz Is Alive And Well. In The Classroom, Anyway
by Nate Chinen, New York Times
Today's aspiring player has a choice of school programs, method and theory books, videos and transcriptions.

Little Asia On The Hill
by Timothy Egan, New York Times
The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics.

Unconsumption
by Rob Walker, New York Times
Most everybody knows — particularly in the aftermath of the consumption-frenzy holiday season — that utility can fade, pleasure can be fleeting and the whole thought-that-counts thing is especially ephemeral. Apart from the usual solution to this problem (more new stuff!), it's worth pondering whether getting rid of stuff can ever feel as good as getting it.

Katrina Victims Find A Solution: Modular House
by Leslie Eaton, New York Times
Modular houses, which range from simple shotgun-style cottages to fancy minimansions, are starting to appear across the Gulf Coast.

Mr. Ford Gets The Last Laugh
by Chevy Chase, New York Times
I've often thought how odd it was that we became linked together. It's not like we had a lot of common. But linked together we were. And not just in the obvious ways.

And You'll Be A Moviegoer, My Son
by A.O. Scott, New York Times
At their best, movies not only offer glimpses of fantastic imaginary worlds, but also inklings of what is, for children, the most intriguing and enigmatic world of all: the world of adulthood.

Saddam Should Have Been Studied, Not Executed
by Richard Dawkins, Los Angeles Times
Sparing Hussein and studying his makeup could have provided valuable research.

Strange Love
by Henry Fountain, New York Times
In an age of color-coded threat levels, the cold war and concepts like mutual assured destruction can seem far away. But they are kept alive at museums and historical sites like the one in Sahuarita, relics of a recent bit of American history.

An American Muslim
by Mehammed Mack, LA Weekly
Maher Hathout and his philosophy of radical openness.

Bellweather
by Tim Wu, Slate
Ma Bell is back. Should you be afraid?

Why Hawks Win
by Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Renshon, Foreign Policy
Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. A look at why the tough guys win more than they should.

And You Thought Snow Globes Were Harmless Decorations
by Joe Sharkey, New York Times
To paraphrase a classic line from Lily Tomlin, I worry that the person who thought up the rules for carrying liquids and gels on airplanes last year is busy thinking up something new this year.

Amazon Mystery: Pricing Of Books
by David Streitfeld, Los Angeles Times
Although the electronic world provides much greater latitude in pricing, as a longtime Amazon watcher I had never seen such an abrupt and unexplained price change.

I'll Have What They Don't Know About Yet
by Alex Witchel, New York Times
Off the menu. Have sweeter words ever been spoken, especially by New Yorkers? We all believe we deserve something more special than the people at the next table, and who's to say we're wrong?

Big Breasts For Dummies
by Wendy Paris, Salon
Mannequins with giant bazooms are busting out in shop windows from coast to coast. More than just garment racks, they are a mirror of current beauty and fashion.

Late-Breaking Deaths In 2006
by Timothy Noah, Slate
Good timing for some, bad timing for others.

Ancient Messages, Hidden In A Dusty Bottle From Long Ago
by Eric Asimov, New York Times
What no one has been able to do is predict when a wine will be at its peak or exactly how it will fare in its descent. What happens after a few decades along the aging trail is a mystery. But wine as old as these bottles borders on the mystical.

How To Operate The Shower Curtain
by Ian Frazier, New Yorker

When Bad Things Come From 'Good' Food
by Denise Grady, New York Times
These days, shopping in the produce aisle feels like a gamble. If you don't pick a winner, the costs could be high.

Snackmakers Chew Over Ideas As America Munches Into The New Year
by David Segal, Washington Post
The American appetite for snacks, much like the American waistline, is always expanding, so the search for the next great flavor never ends.

Long-Ago Snow
by Mitch Keller, New York Times
With the exception of the rare power blackout, nothing disrupts life in New York like a winter storm. This was especially true a century ago, long before conveniences like the Weather Channel and 24/7 takeout, and devices like computers and cellphones that make instant communication possible.

The Lonely Newspaper Reader
by David Carr, New York Times
As I sat at the kitchen table, I marveled at the low price of a newspaper that had once preoccupied the conversation around my dinner table. Then I looked at the four papers on the table and the empty chairs that surrounded them.