N’est-ce pas parce que nous cultivons la brume? — Rimbaud It’s tempting to try to sort out the good Derrida from the bad but the longer I try the more it all seems bad. Of course, it’s easy to separate the early, middle and late in the hopes of quarantining his earlier and seemingly more lucid works from the deluge which followed, but once the lines have been drawn it is clear that most of his annoying tics were present from the very ...

Part 1: The Arms Race (*metaphor stolen from Henry Em) Before I left Seoul I had planned to write a follow-up portrait of my experience with the education system there. If first grade was about the training of protocol and relationships between people in the system, second grade, for me, was about the training of academic anxiety. In my first-grade post I was able to watch the jockeying for status and alliance as well as the expression of acad...

And how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. 1. There was the way you mistagged our luggage when we departed for Long Beach, CA from Chicago’s O’Hare. It wasn’t a busy day, there was no one else in line ahead of us. Did the quiet cause you to sleep on the job? When we got to California and found a small black suitcase with red trim with our tag on it instead of our large black Samsonite, you made it seem like it was our fault.

I want to start by thanking Cat for putting her virtual finger on something that had been pulsing in my brain but I hadn’t been able to see clearly or articulate. She commented: As a first-time mom, I felt inundated with messages that I had to establish a routine and surround my daughter with familiar things. So, it was hard to get my mind around taking her on a plane trip that would a) fubar her nap schedule and b) put her in a weird place.

I’m not sure if “thanks” are in order, but a tip of the imaginary hat atop my dizzied noggin to E Hayot for passing along the link to the series of NY Times posts generated in response to Stanley Fish’s, well, let’s call it a review, of François Cusset’s French Theory. The postings were both utterly predictable and utterly horrifying: bile-filled rants, smug dismissals, friends-worse-than-enemies endorsements (it’s a harmless game!), Zen parab...

There are many, but I'll limit myself to one today: public spitting. I don't get it. Why are there so many people (mostly men) who feel the overwhelming need to hack up a glob and spit it out in public spaces? Traveling through the city on my weekday commute, I've come across this phenomenon more often than I’d like. Walking from the train, I routinely look down at the sidewalk in front of me so I can avoid the spittle smearing the concrete.

Alain Robbe-Grillet died about a month ago at the age of 86. Sadly, I learned of the event only by reading an embarrassing piece by novelist Stephen Marche on salon.com. Once again the American press has seized on the occasion of a French writer’s death to shake up that peculiar cocktail of smugness and injury that all things French seem, these days, to permit and even require. The upshot: Robbe-Grillet “was a disaster for innovative novels.” ...

Recently I flipped on the TV and found myself watching the last number of a Celine Dion special, in which the blade-faced Quebecoise swished around in a disconcertingly short skirt before a camera set a few feet below the level of the stage. Watching the show, I reflected that what is so offensive about her is not simply that she's bad but rather that a vast number of stupid people think she's good.

Last night I saw John Ashbery give a reading on campus. He opened with a daunting double sestina from Flow Chart — as if to remind us that he was once a virtuoso, that back in the heroic age of Secretariat and Seattle Slew it was he alone who had won poetry’s Triple Crown — and then read several poems from his latest volume. In the question-and-answer period afterward he was remarkably open and down-to-earth, and at the end he even signed au...

I went into the city the other day — you wouldn’t believe how disgusting it was. Every office, every bar, there was a clump of people standing outside smoking and no room to go around them. On such a gray day you could hardly tell if you were inside or out. Throw in packs of taxis and all the delivery trucks and it felt like there was twice as much carbon as oxygen.

In a country haunted by Puritanism, reformers are viewed with an ungrateful eye. If you are trying to change something, most people seem to feel that you are going to take away one of their indulgences. This translates into a perverse effect, as the economists call it. The health bores want to take away sugar and transfats and red meat—instantly, these things become precious in themselves and signs of defiant liberty. Feminists want to see les...

We have spent two weeks now on this process of dissecting, marinating, fermenting, and squeezing Mallon’s questions, hoping, perhaps, for some alchemical transformation to occur. I almost feel sorry for the guy... NOT. (I finally saw Borat.) Despite Mallon we have, I think, managed to have an interesting discussion about the current intellectual environment, and pose some of our own questions. I’m going to follow E Wesp’s lead and step back fr...

Can one possibly greet news of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the Definitive 200 albums with anything but weary disdain? A disdain which quickly turns to despair and strained confusion on seeing the actual list?

In a world crammed so chock full of stupidities that some days it seems ready to burst, one in particular which has been annoying me for literally decades is a lyric from Bob Geldof’s 1984 famine-relief benefit track which goes, Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

I should start with a confession: I originally wanted to call this piece “Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?” –and that was pretty much the whole idea. I typed up some initial notes and then went looking around the internets for an image of Ms. Dowd, whereupon I found not one but three existing articles with that title (a reprint of a New York piece in The Age, Slate, and one by Wonkette), along with “Yes, Maureen Dowd is Necessary” (oh snap!) on Salo...

With any luck in a matter of days the furor over John Kerry’s botched joke will be over and the political news will be dominated by something really important, like the discovery that a Democratic Congressman somewhere in Michigan is driving a French car, or something Sean Penn says about gay marriage, or the revelation that someone with a subscription to The New York Times once smoked pot, followed by the White House demand that the paper ret...

I once went to a SoHo art gallery opening with a friend of mine, a painter, who worked at the gallery by day as an office manager. After I had walked the length of the place and looked at the entire exhibit, he led me behind the reception desk and showed me a painting by the same artist which wasn’t in the show. “Look, isn’t it good?” he said. It was a shoddily painted portrait of a man’s head enclosed in a crude circle of red paint. All aroun...

I admit it! I’ve never studied abroad, I’ve never backpacked, I’ve never field-tripped, I’ve never, ever, been to Europe. I’ve been to Mexico more times than I can count, which seems to be, interestingly enough, neither where I come from nor where I’m currently living, considered “international travel” when people are trading stories. Get this: I don’t even have a passport.

On the whole I like road trips. Well, with the wrong company they are about the worst thing in the world, but with the right company I really like them. So, more out a spirit of contrariness than any devotion to accuracy, the persona of my inner crank offers, in retort to S L Kim, ten things to hate about road trips.

Yesterday, at the office, I checked the New York Times online at 10:10 am and found the “breaking news” headline that Kenneth Lay had died earlier that morning. I wondered if it was suicide. I wondered if Lay had suffered dark, tormented thoughts, having finally awakened to the enormity of his crimes. The news of his death was posted just minutes before, at 10:04 am, and there wasn't yet a link to the short AP article explaining t...

In a Mediterranean restaurant in Columbus, Ohio a few days ago, a server, after taking the order of one of my companions, turned to me and said “and what would you like, sir?” I gave him my order, undeterred, not seeing a point in correcting the man, gendered nouns having little to do with requesting, eating or paying for falafel. Nevertheless my companions and I did raise our eyebrows at each other as we continued with our orders. Giving me a...

No one seems to question what investment bankers do, to pick an example. What do people imagine when they imagine the labor of a Wall Street suit? Talking on the phone a lot, wearing a little headset? Tracking stock prices and talking about portfolios and ratios and indices? As long as there’s money being made and money to be made doing it, no one worries too much about what the work entails, day in and day out, or whether it’s really work. N...

My wife recently requested I put the hurt on Sufjan Stevens. Out of contrariness, I defended him. His music is mild but inoffensive, entirely suitable for sweater shopping or hanging Christmas ornaments down at the old folks’ home, and he has clearly put some thought into choosing his arrangements and instrumentation. Why not live and let live? Where’s the harm? But no husband or natural-born son could be spiteful enough to defend Bright ...

TV writers particularly lamented the rise of reality TV, since it put them out of a job. The good news for them is that this trend too is passing and scripted drama is making its comeback. The new trend in network TV is what I call the Long Arc series (though I think the suits are still using the old catch-all term "high concept"), shows whose individual episodes are often a little weak but which keep you watching by an addictive season-long...