Back in 2019, when a person didn’t have to quarantine for two weeks each time he crossed a state border, the author and bar owner Brian Bartels cashed in all his vacation time and spent a few months visiting 44 of the 50 states. On some long weekends, he’d hit three or four. His goal? To find out where people drank, what they drank and why.
The result is “The United States of Cocktails,” a new book that enumerates, explores and celebrates hundreds of regional bars, drinking traditions, spirits, quaffs and quirks.
What do Woody Allen, Roger Stone, thimerosal, and adult coloring books have in common? It sounds like the kind of dystopian crack that should only have a punch line. And yet, there is an answer, and the answer is Skyhorse Publishing.
As a fellow resident of Stratford-upon-Avon, I have long known Shakespeare’s writings to be full of gardening wisdom, and while watching a film of Romeo and Juliet recently, I found yet another example. What words of horticultural truth the old Franciscan, Friar Laurence, utters: “For naught so vile that on the earth doth live/But to the earth some special good doth give.” I thought immediately of my compost bins, simmering in the corner of the garden.
“Of all the works I have to confront, this is probably one of the simplest,” Ms. Stringari said. “It’s duct tape and a banana,” she added.
The conservation of conceptual art is not always so straightforward for museums increasingly asked to preserve works made from of all kinds of ephemeral substances, like food.
In her new book, “You Talkin’ to Me?”, E.J. White of Stony Brook University celebrates the disputatious, never-let-them-call-you-a-sucker language that is New York English. Ms White reckons a conversational manner that might be called “assertive” by, say, polite Britons, is, for New Yorkers, not rude but the opposite: a sign of engagement, and therefore of warmth. Patient, slow-paced styles can, to the New Yorker, seem aloof.
RikkaRikk—the wind
rattled in airshaft windows fifty years ago
when you put Doc and Merle on the RCA