With the help of my Atlantic Wire colleagues, I have compiled 12 contenders for the best summer food, along with the reasons we would consume these items all year round if we had our druthers. Who is the top of the summer food pile? Help us choose.
"Let’s get this straight up front: I am now writing a blog post, not blogging a blog," writes Forrest Wickman at Slate, the good people who brought you the great two-spaces-after-a-period debate. Oh yes. Oh yes. They are at it again, this time with a post in which he takes on the matter of what to call this thing we do.
This month Random House Children's Books released The Mighty Lalouche, a picture book by Matthew Olshan illustrated by Sophie Blackall. It gets my vote for cutest picture book of the year so far.
Now that we've reached Memorial Day weekend, the kick-off to the season and all of its sweaty flair, Mister Softee worship can begin in full, right along with a lot of Mister Softee hate.
New Jersey state investigators have revealed that 29 bars and restaurants, including 13 TGI Fridays, stand "accused of putting cheap booze in premium brand liquor bottles and selling it to patrons who thought they were buying the good stuff." Oof.
It's that time of year when people begin to ask you, "What are your plans this summer?" So, what are your plans this summer? Will you be traveling? Or will you be embarking on the most beautiful travel plan of all, the one in which you vacation to your own home?
If you think juice is something that comes in orange and apple alone, you are missing out on a whole world of juice. The year 2013 will go down in history as the time of the juiciest juice wars yet. Who will the Next Top Juicer be?
What sort of dining experience is the right sort of dining experience for the diner who's seen it all, done it all, eaten it all, and is just so weary over simply sitting in a nice restaurant and eating? Dinner while hanging from a rope, for $500 each, for the pleasure of dining really, really alfresco.
A first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the first book in J.K. Rowling's phenomenally selling 7-part series, has been acquired for 150,000 pounds (or $227,421) at a London charity auction held by Sotheby's and organized with the English PEN writers' association.
In the past five years Drew Magary has given the world The Postmortal, a novel about a pre-apocalyptic world, Men with Balls, a "professional athletes handbook," and now Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood. It's not the typical parenting memoir.
Stoical types will tell you that the only way to SUI well is to not do it at all, but there are some tips that can help you do it better. Because chances are, you are going to be exposed to a drink and a store, or a drink and your computer and an Internet connection, at some point in the very near future. You might as well be prepared, or as prepared as possible. Follow these rules.
Despite the horror of it all, one of the most amusing stories of the day involves the public reaction to Britain's Royal Horticultural Society's decision to allow the presence of garden gnomes at this year's Chelsea Flower Show.
That crowdsourced compilation of online slang you probably know is becoming a go-to resource for the courts. Is this reasonable, or terrible?
One aspect of Brooklyn's Barclays Center that hasn't gotten much media attention until now is, well, the way it smells. How does it smell?
Sometimes it feels like we've all been talking about tiny apartments for a long, long time. This is only reasonable. Combine the inherently compelling aspects of looking into someone else's home with the even more intriguing aspects of that place being, perhaps, largely unlivable, at least by any outside-of-the-city standards.
Well, last night's Mad Men — the eighth episode this season, titled "The Crash" — was interesting to say the least. Some people loved it, others hated it, and it left a lot of us a bit befuddled (much like Ted Chaough in the photo above).
Allow me to present a hypothesis: Dan Brown is the Anne Hathaway of authors. Hard-working, serious about his craft (even if others aren't), with lots and lots of money to show for his work. And people love to hate him as much, and sometimes even more, than they love to love him.
Staffers at a zoological conservation center in Greenwich, Conn., are very confused — as are the rest of us — because their female giant anteater, Armani, has managed to conceive a baby, apparently without the presence of a male anteater. What?
All over the U.S.A. it is pretty darn nice out. People are wearing their summery dresses, their shorts, their sandals, their T-shirts and pants, without the necessity or precaution of an added jacket covering just in case. It is finally, maybe, summer. What should one do about that? Get ready. Like so.
Kale, kale, surely you've heard of kale. Anyone who's anyone is eating it. Any restaurant worth its pink Himalayan salt is selling it. When we speak of trendy foods, kale is it!
A fiery debate rousing the Internet today is the one over hugs. You may not have known this, but hugs can be divisive. There are, of course, as many types of huggers as there are types of humans. Read on for a few Hug Types you might find familiar.
Here's a warning: That food festival you're hell-bent on attending might be terrible. It might, on the other hand, be an utterly delicious frolic. All this really depends on you.
Men can blow dry hair and wear makeup just like women can. There has been progress for makeup-wearing men. Will we ever reach a place when the "What, men are doing this, too?" trend story can retire?
There's a whole world of re-imagined book covers for classic novels, and it goes well beyond those new Leonardo Di Caprio editions of The Great Gatsby.
Last night's Mad Men could be called an escalation episode. SCDP and CGC are in the process of merging, and things are closing in and constricting, even while the agency is expanding. Oh, and there are power struggles!
In honor of Sunday's holiday, I asked an array of writers and other web folk to share stories that demonstrate the awesomeness of their particular moms. They've copy edited our work, made us the tacos that we like, hugged us into feeling better, made sure we were alive, inspired us in our own careers, and generally made us better people. Moms are awesome.
Kids' bedrooms are different now. Think "teen wing of the house" different, with videogame arcades, secret Harry Potter passageways, and DJ mixing stations, if you're lucky.
Thursday Styles is bumping and grinding with all the vim and vigor of a sunny day. Have you heard of the latest trend in lunch, what all of the coolest office-weary kids are doing on their mid-day gruel breaks? They're. Dancing.
Let's just go ahead and call Meg Wolitzer's fantastic The Interestings the book of the moment, the novel you should really read, if you haven't already. At a cafe in Manhattan recently, I spoke to the author about the need to "radicalize your work," why a novel is like an accordion, and how getting a bad review is like having your head shaved in public, to name just a few things.
Here's the perfect website to fix what ills you, real-estate-wise. Schadenfreude, we have you.
Oversharing is widely deplored and highly criticized, and those who commit the crime are often themselves considered affronts to good taste. Maybe they can't help it. Also, couldn't it be worse? Beware the undershare!
Are there ways to make your work-from-home routine a bit more productive, and you, yourself, ever so slightly more efficient, all the while remaining firmly planted upon your own couch?
You've heard of the book. You've heard of the major motion picture. But what's in a name, when the name is Gatsby? An investigation into the popularization of a word that is only sort of a word.
Last night's Mad Men is being called the comeback episode. There was Joan calling out the Don Draper-man's world, Megan's mother Marie giving sex tips and drinking straight from a bottle of wine, and Peggy fantasizing about her boss. Oh, and a twist, too.
Last night's episode of Mad Men, "The Flood," brought our characters to a pivotal date in history: April 4, 1968, the day that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
The merger between the two huge publishers is on schedule, and may even happen more quickly than anticipated, according to an internal memo that went out Friday morning.
It is a fact, whether sad or happy, that when a book becomes a movie with a big star or two and a lot of press, that book generally gets a new cover. Such is the case for The Great Gatsby, and some people are sad about that.
Since we learned their names one week ago, some have called Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev terrorists, a labeling supported by the news that they hatched a plan to bomb New York — not just "party" there. Others have called them bros, and maybe — just maybe — that's a way of regaining some semblance of power.
In the upcoming New York Times Sunday Review, American novelist Amanda Filipacchi writes of a recent discovery that further evinces the issue of sexism as it persists in the literary world. This time, it's happening on Wikipedia.
For the last two years, 20-year-old Shane Burcaw has shared his tales of life with spinal muscular atrophy on the wildly popular Tumblr called Laughing at My Nightmare. Now he's writing a memoir, which he just sold to Macmillan.
David Itzkoff's piece in The New York Times about nine letters sent from a 22-year-old (pre-Catcher in the Rye) J.D. Salinger to a young Toronto woman reveals that the author was flirty, a bit of a fibber, and maybe a little bit heartbroken.
The photographs in Alex Vadukul's New York Times story about Neale Albert, a 75-year-old collector of miniature books, are as squee-inducing as anything you might see on Cute Overload—except, of course, the subjects pictured are not piglets or puppies but books.
This weekend brought the news that beloved children's author E.L. Konigsburg had died at the age of 83. But in our minds, the authors of our childhood favorites never grow old, nor does their writing.
Last night's episode of Mad Men was called "To Have and to Hold," and like last week, it was as soapy as the name would have you think.
Author and New Yorker editor Ben Greenman recently faced a slight Twitter addiction problem, has "dozens of secret sources," and tries "like hell to read normal books."
How should we feel about the flavored new varietals that are coming down the pike, with which manufacturers hope to win over women and "novice drinkers"? Should flavored whisky exist? We discuss.
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