MyAppleMenu Reader

In My Own Words
by Mark Lawson, The Guardian
Stephen King, Agatha Christie and Evelyn Waugh have all put fictional authors into their works. Is it escapism or egotism?

Kitchen Chemistry Is Chic, But Is It A Woman's Place?
by Laura Shapiro, New York Times
Gender differences in professional cooking probably go back to the hunters and gatherers — more precisely, to the day it first occurred to the hunters to award four stars to themselves and none to the gatherers. But rarely have the differences seemed as stark as they do now, when the chefs winning some of the most bedazzled press coverage in memory belong to a breed of culinary artists who are overwhelmingly male.

Ciao, Cookbooks!
by Jonathan Beecher Field, Salon
With food blogs multiplying like weeds and millions of recipes available with a simple keystroke, has the internet made the cookbook obsolete?

Beneath The Burqas
by Paul Watson, Los Angeles Times
The world's largest Muslim country is ground zero for a fledgling literary movement whose topi is sex and whose practitioners are women.

A Clock And Ball Story
by Gene Weingarten, Washington Post
Entertainment for the modern man.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda
by Francesco Bonami, New York Times
The word on Chinese art right now is "Buy!" but I'm not convinced that we Westerners really understand what's going on there.

Long Iraq Tours Can Make Home A Trying Front
by Lizette Alvarez, New York Times
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and loved ones have endured long, sometimes repeated separations that test the fragility of their relationships in unforeseen ways.

Chefs Are Putting New Accents On Sushi
by N. C. Aizenman, Washington Post
non-Japanese workers feed popular demand in learning iconic craft.

Mom's Mad. And She's Organized.
by Kara Jesella, New York Times
A generation of mothers who are largely perceived as postfeminist in every way, from sex to economic discrimination, has begun a consciousness-raising that is almost old-fashioned were it not for the technology involved.

Disney World, Orlando Beyond Disney
by T. D. Allman, National Geographic Magazine
When people tell the story of Orlando's stunning transformation from swamp and sinkhole to 21-st century metropolis, they begin, inevitably, with the man and the mouse.

Autumn And The Plot Against Me
by Nick Tosches, Vanity Fair
By now I know the name of this particular wallpaper or background or whatever it is: Autumn. Moving to the desk and gazing more closely, I see a vague, dark, summoning something at the end of the path. A cabin? A covered bridge? A barn? I want to be there, for real, on that path, under those maples, moving slowly toward that dark, summoning something.

Outrageous Fortune
by Bonnie Tsui, Salon
For five decades the fortune cookie, a true immigrant success story, has been the crunchy, cryptic completion to any Chinese-American restaurant meal.

Free Beer
by Henry Lanman, Boston Globe
*Well, as in 'free software.' Bringing the open source movement to brewing.

Advantage Britain
by Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times
What sets the English apart from our actors? It's more than just a way with words.

With One Word, Children's Book Sets Off Uproar
by Julie Bosman, New York Times
The word "scrotum" does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children's literature, for that matter. Yet there it is on the first page of "The Higher Power of Lucky," by Susan Patron, this year's winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children's literature.

The Awakening Of Hanoi
by Jennifer Conlin, New York Times
I thought about why I had come to Hanoi — to see a country I knew only from history books and vaguely remembered images from the nightly news in the 1970s. Thirty years later, I found myself experiencing an enormous disconnect.

Live From New York, It's Cold People Waiting In Line
by Ben Sisario, New York Times
As I learned while standing my way into every studio I could, the price for those free seats is time. And in deep winter there is another cost: the price of long johns. And something to protest tender ears from bitterly unfunny gusts.

Brazil Nuts
by Anonymous, Washington City Paper
Tales of a bikini waxer.

He Cooks. She Stews. It's Love.
by Katherine Wheelock, New York Times
True, life with an alpha cook can mean sitting back and watching while someone else prepares restaurant-quality wild mushrom risotto on a quiet Tuesday night. But it can also mean putting up with small culinary humiliations and an unending patter of condescending remarks.

Great Poems About Sex
by Robert Pinsky, Slate
Here is Slate's little anthology of love poems for Valentine's Day, once again trying to have it both ways: accepting the traditional association of love with verse but going light on the sugar. This year, let's look at sex.

Chinese Welcome New Year In A Whole Fish Way
by Kimberly W. Moy, Boston Globe
For home cooks with access to a Chinese supermarket — or any market that sells whole fish — Chinese New Year dinner isn't an overwhelming task. The most challenging part of serving a whole fish is gutting it. That's done before you leave the store.

Say Everything
by Emily Nussbaum, New York Magazine
As younger people reveal their private lives on the internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.

In Travel Writing, Even Vacation Is Work
by Peter J. Frank, as told to Christopher Elliott, New York Times
I envy business travelers for whom a business trip is a business trip, and a vacation is a vacation. As someone who edits a travel site, my business trips are business trips, and my vacations are — business trips.

Flashy Libraries? I Prefer To Get My Adventure Out Of The Books Not The Building
by Germaine Greer, The Guardian
I like my libraries stable, durable, serene. I am looking for adventure in the books, rather than in the building.

The Needle And The Damage Done
by Elizabeth Weil, New York Times
Lethal injections are often botched and sometimes painful. Doctors don't want to administer them. Is it time to kill this form of execution?

Ah, Paris — The Romance, The Food, The Airport, The Agony
by Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times
I don't think our family can again face the gantlet of security forces one must go through to get in and out of this country. Or in and out of Los Angeles for that matter. Perhaps the terrorists have won after all.

Viewpoint
by Sarah Vine, The Times
Well, zut alors! A distinguished French literary professor has become a surprise bestselling author by writing a book explaining how to wx intellectual about tomes that you have never actually read. Obviously, I haven't read this book; but it is in the spirit of his oeuvre that I shall proceed to write about it anyway.

How Green Was My Wedding
by Mireya Navarro, New York Times
People in the wedding business say the eco-friendly or "green" wedding has arrived, its appeal having expanded to spur a mini-industry of stores and web sites offering couples biodegradable plates made of sugar cane fiber and flowers grown according to sustainable farming practices.

What Are You Laughing At?
by Simon Pegg, The Guardian
You could spend a lot of time exploring the differences between British and American comedy only to reach the conclusion that, ironically, they're pretty much the same.

Fugitive
by Jim Dwyer, New York Times
Feb 6, 1985, the night he fled prison, Orlando Boquete, 30 years old, had already spent two years behind bars for a sexual assault and burglary he had nothing to do with, the victim of a victim who mistook him for the man who climbed in her window. Ahead of him, as far as the eye could see, were mountains of time: five decades. He bolted.

The Truth About Beauty
by Virginia Postrel, The Atlantic
Beauty exists, and it's unevenly distributed.

Time For Reading
by Lindsay Waters, Chronicle Of Higher Education
The role of literature is to mess with time, to establish its own time, its own rhythm. A new agenda for literary studies should open up the time of reading, just as it opens up how the writer establishes his or her rhythm. Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don't even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words.

The Unsinkable Suzanne Somers
by Gina Piccalo, Los Angeles Times
How a 'dumb blond' turned her life crises into a commercial juggernaut.

Orwell's "Catalonia" Revisited
by Anthony Daniels, The New Criterion
Now that Marxist Communism as a ruling doctrine has all but disappeared from the face of earth (though its effects certainly live on), Orwell's most celebrated books have lost some of their urgency. It is even possible that generations to come, historically uninformed and uninterested, will wonder what on earth they were all about. By then, of course, Newspeak will have become so deeply entrenched that no one will realize that he is talking it, for it is the fate of satire in the modern world to become prophecy.

Applauding The Relaxing Of Rules Of Clapping In Classical Concerns
by Andrew Druckenbrod, Pittsburg Post-Gazette
As concert-hall etiquette evolves, many musicians say they don't mind premature clapping.

Sharp Bites
by Allen Salkin, New York Times
There is a new food game in the city that never stops grazing. A proliferation of blogs treating every menu revision, construction permit, clash of egos and suspiciously easy-to-get reservation as high drama is changing the rules of the restaurant world and forcing everyone from owners to chefs to publicists to get used to the added scrutiny.

The New Yovaguers
by Mike Mosedale, City Pages
Wherein six Minnesotans brave the Mekong River, whirlpools, and dysentery in a leaky boat with a lawnmower engine held together by toothpaste and cardboard and live to tell about it.

The Loneliest President
by John Heilemann, New York Magazine
What's going on in George Bush's mind? A psychopolitical survey.

That's Handy
by Vanessa Friedman, Financial Times
Recently I have realised that powerful women carry either small bags or no bag at all. As far as I can tell, this is a relatively new thing.

Now That A Penny Isn't Worth Much, It's Time To Make It Worth 5 Cents
by Austan Goolsbee, New York Times
How dumb do you have to be to mint money at a loss? In the latest only-in-Washington episode, we find that the government may have lost as much as $40 million coining pennies and nickels last year.