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.
Today, Charlotte's Web, the most famous book by the masterful E.B. White, has turned 60. It is no worse for wear in terms of readability and resonance, even amid a world of dystopias, fantasies, and futuristic plots and themes.
A piece in this month's Economist adds fuel to the Anglocreep fire: People who aren't British want butlers now. Some of them can actually afford to hire one.
Can a time period be defined by its method of killing the pesky housefly—or the mosquito, the cockroach, the spider, or other unwanted home invaders of the insect variety? Perhaps.
Last night sitting Vice President Joe Biden faced off against Republican nominee Paul Ryan for the first—and only—VP debate we're going to get this year. Was there excitement? There was some excitement! Here we're going to talk mostly about the semantics and style of the debate.
"Can you believe we're talking about this in 2012?" asks New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan in a piece regarding a recent inflammatory situation involving best-selling novelist Jennifer Weiner and New York Times Magazine contributor Andrew Goldman. She's talking about the way we talk about sexism.
Just a handful of the Y.A. and middle-grade books I read while growing up in the '80s featured overweight or obese characters. Usually they weren't the protagonists. Since then, things have changed a bit, but Skinny, by debut Y.A. novelist Donna Cooner, promises to bring some new conversations to the category.
Why are so many American writers using expressions like bumbling toff, fortnight, and lovely piece of kit—why, possibly worse, are words like crikey, loo, cheers, brilliant, flat, twee, ginger, whinge, sot, rubbish, and so on "Anglocreeping" their way through our country's vernacular?
Andrew Sullivan, who recently leased an apartment in New York City, writes in a blog post titled "New York Shitty" that "Moving to New York while blogging an election was probably too large a leap for an excitable chap like myself," he explains. "Does it get better?"
There's a rise in a particular form of cute that merits our attention. This is a kind of anti-cute, cute primarily in how ugly it is. The most recent example of such is the Brooklyn aquarium's newly expected baby walrus: so ugly, he's freaking adorable.
It's the third day of coverage in the New York Post for Larry Greenfield, the multi-millionaire who said that the six matchmaker services to whom he'd paid $65,000 hadn't done a good enough job in the last 12 years and 250 women to set him up with the girl of his dreams.
The New York Times' After Deadline blog has a noteworthy semantical discussion today in light of the presidential debates and all the fact-checking and talking about fact-checking that's guaranteed to keep happening until the election on November 6, and maybe afterward, too. Let us count the ways in which we incorrectly use the word fact.
Jane Austen fans are hardly wilting wallflowers but instead an avid array of people who dress up in period costumes and talk passionately about favorite books and miscellany from their beloved author despite it being nearly 200 years after her death.
This week's love lesson comes by way of the New York Post, where much ink has been dedicated to the relationship travails of Larry Greenfield, 47, a retired Long Island securities trader who has spent more than $65,000 on six different matchmaking services in 12 years.
Writer Kate Milford and I sat down to talk with beloved children's author Lois Lowry upon the release of her latest novel, Son, the final book in The Giver quintet.
Like many of us, I watched last night's first debate of the 2012 presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, but I was paying particular attention not to content but to style, semantic choices, and the use of those tricky crutch words.
If you're not as inherently excited about the prospect of tonight's debate as we are, we've put it into the context of a semantical drinking game, pairing drinks featuring low-to-high alcoholic content with the high-to-low likelihood of crutch words. Play along at home; debates start at 9 p.m. EDT.
Jessica Grose's debut novel, Sad Desk Salad, featuring the character of Alex Lyons, a writer for "Chick Habit, an increasingly popular women's website" (a la Jezebel and Slate's Double X, both sites at which Grose blogged), is out this week from William Morrow/Harper Collins.
Apropos of crutch words, apropos of despicable words, apropos of very word-world as we know it, there's another word rant that I must bring to your immediate attention. Really. Really! Really? Oh yes.
New research says that even Facebook, where we use our real names and identities, makes us behave terribly. Is the Internet really making us so awful, or were we, perhaps, just bad to start with, and getting worse? We discuss.
Cheers, that bar we all know and love—those of us old enough to have experienced it on the teevee, and those of us young enough to consider it nostalgic now that we're 21—has turned 30. In honor of this anniversary, we've taken a look at a few of our other favorite TV bars in hopes of learning more about, of course, ourselves.
According to the New York Post's Dana Schuster, "Waiting up to three hours for a table—then bragging about it on social media—is NYC’s hot new dining trend." Oh, is it?
On Friday the news of a certain study was making the Internet rounds, pleasing an array of people who seemed to take it as support that all this "feminism" and "gender equality" stuff was a bunch of bunk, that women should really be in the kitchen, doing housework, if they expected their marriages to remain marriages and not head toward divorce post-haste.
Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's Fresh Air and an author herself, exemplifies the reading life. For her, that means limiting her online reading and getting up as early as 4 a.m. to tackle the more than 100 books delivered to her house weekly.
Ah, what is a freelancer to do about love, given all the working from home alone in a state of barely dressed disarray he or she tends to do—meaning that said freelancer doesn't see anyone other than, maybe, a food delivery person or his or her own cat, on a regular basis? The answer is coffee.
Hark, a new entry in our ever-growing list of questionable marriage proposals! In this case, as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, pilot Ryan Thompson proposed during a sightseeing flight with his girlfriend by claiming that something was wrong with the plane.
On this very Friday 25 years ago, The Princess Bride, a movie featuring the beautiful Robin pre-Penn Wright and the dashing Cary Elwes (whom hordes of teen girls would go on to have enormous crushes on), was released.
There's a study in the news that's bound to get a bunch of people talking (Drudge tweeted it this morning, for instance, with more than 100 retweets). Whether those people are for or against its pronouncements, it seems to fly in the face of what we thought we knew about marriage, gender equality, and the way modern, successful relationships work.
There is no end to what the erotic Fifty Shades book series might do, even as we thought or rather hoped the fervor had faded, as least somewhat, for other fare. Still, there are 32 million copies sold in the U.S. They're not going anywhere, yet.
Not everyone can remember exactly what happened the night before, but they're pretty sure they did something. Around the nation, in towns large and small, something is afoot.
Misuses of words are fast and frequent and come in any number of varieties. They are not all the same. Here are a few of the most likely ways we confuse our words, with examples to learn from.
We predicted this. Or, at least, we predicted the impending backlash to our nation's growing obsession with yogurt—Greek yogurt, specifically. Now there's a New York Post trend story on the subject. Backlash machine, activate!
Until J.K. Rowling's new novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, comes out on Thursday at its worldwide on-sale time of 8 a.m. GMT (so 3 a.m. ET and 12 a.m. PT), it is strictly guarded by her publisher's non-disclosure requirements. But the A.P. has released their review of the book anyway.
Drinking Diaries is an essay collection based on the blog of the same name started by Leah Odze Epstein and Caren Osten Gerszberg in 2009. The common thread for the stories within is booze.
Britain's prime minister David Cameron has recently used the word butch in a sarcastic fashion to describe a Labour party leader as not good at his job, i.e., not masculine enough. What can we learn from this?
Today Doree Lewak takes on prenups in the New York Post, and they are crazy! It says it right there in the article headline, "New York's craziest prenups." So it's gotta be good. What are they? How nuts, exactly? And what does it mean?
We've all heard the schoolchildren's chant that goes, basically, "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage," or some iteration thereof. Of course, in this day and age, that's not always the chronology at all.
As we gathered punctuation favorites from a range of our favorite writers, novelists, and word knowledgable people, we ran into a cold, hard fact. Some punctuation marks were hated, perhaps none more vehemently than the exclamation point. It was a mark hated most of all by Grantland staff writer Rembert Browne.
Punctuation can be both the great love and the occasional bane of a writer's existence, and it's not strange that a love affair may crop up with regard to one of those marks—or, contrarily, perhaps a great hatred may grow.
A topic near and dear to our hearts—quarters are close, there—is the ongoing discussion of small apartments in urban environments. If there's one real estate thing glass-half-full people enjoy marveling over and glass-half-empty types love to judge and condem, it's tiny, tiny apartments.
Just when you thought maybe we'd stopped talking hipster to death as a term (haven't we killed it, already?) it rears its head again: This time in Forbes' gleeful list of "America's Hippest Hipster Neighborhoods."
Prepare yourself, people who love words and writing and those symbols we use to designate pauses and emotions and inflections (and such) throughout our prose and occasionally poetry as well. Monday is the annual holiday of National Punctuation Day!
Chickification: This is a term our dear friend Rush Limbaugh adores, considering it some sort of powerful way to demean women. But for having made it up, it's still rather unclear what it means. And why should we take his word for what chickification is?
Online dating is now so commonplace that we need scientific research to remind us that, oh yes, it's not that as a form of dating it's any better at helping you find your soulmate (or just a likely companion) than the traditional varieties. What's wrong with an old-fashioned sign?
As Teen Lit Rocks' Sandie Angulo Chen puts it, "To be honest, some of the sexiest books -- to me -- don't necessarily go all the way."
Another of New York City's iconic establishments, the University Restaurant diner on University and 12th Street, has closed. If we lose the diner, where do we get our pitch-perfect slices of life?
The chorus of "poor Monica Lewinsky"—alone and miserable, a memory of something indecent and tawdry in America, a soiled Gap dress, a beret, something-something to do with the commander-in-chief, that man, Bill Clinton—is going to change with her tell-all. But can it ever change for the better?
We're already gearing up for the year's big literary/gambling hybrid: The 2012 Nobel prize for literature! Will our laureate be Bob Dylan? Haruki Murakami? Mo Yan or Cees Nooteboom? The speculation has begun.
The emoticon is old. Or, young, 30 years young! Either way, it's a bona fide grown-up symbol now, with the life experience under its lack of a belt (for it has no waist) to prove it.
Someday, we'll all be reading online, you'd imagine, but for now we have an Internet overly populated by youngs, particularly when it comes to blogging and revealing the ins and outs of their dating lives and oft TMI sexual exploits.
The world is divided between makers and takers: those who tip and those who demand to be tipped, and the two sides are at odds. Is 25 percent the new 47 percent?
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