Three things you probably didn’t know about your toothbrush: There are five common toothbrush grips, including one with the suggestive name of 'the death grip'; fat-handled toothbrushes make for a more comfortable grip; and, despite perceptions otherwise, straight-handled toothbrushes make for better brushing than bent-handled ones.

I learned these random tidbits while listening to "99% Invisible," a tiny little radio show about the world of design, focused on the design of things we often overlook. As Roman Mars, the show's host, notes at the end of the toothpaste episode: “In design, the thing you don’t think about or notice probably had the most thought put into it.” Mars' [...]

You know when you’re in a panel discussion in New York and the topic turns to gentrification, and the audience gets very quiet while everyone prays there won’t be some guy who stands up and says something excruciating? L. J. Davis was that guy.

Davis, a writer whose career was long enough that a lot of people forgot who he was for stretches along the way, died last week at 70. He wrote four novels in the '60s and '70s and, over a longer span, produced a substantial body of cranky and annoyingly accurate journalism. (A Harper’s article that essentially called the 1987 market crash won him a [...]

Romance fiction is widely reckoned to be a very low form of literature. Maybe the lowest, if we're not counting the writing at Groupon, or on Splenda packets. Romance fiction: probably the worst! An addictive, absurd, unintellectual literature, literature for nonreaders, literature for stupid people—literature for women! Books Just For Her!

Low or not, romance is by far the most popular and lucrative genre in American publishing, with over $1.35 billion in revenues estimated in 2010. That is a little less than twice the size of the mystery genre, almost exactly twice that of science fiction/fantasy, and nearly three times the size of the market for classic/literary fiction, according to [...]

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of All Shook Down, the final album by the Replacements, a band from Minneapolis that I am now finding greater difficulty writing about than I thought I would because of their huge, huge importance to me. Let me puke out something like that, in the mid-80s when I was a teenager and they were at their peak, their fuzzy, blaring rock n' roll was the sound of truth and freedom and glory as I heard it, and that Paul Westerberg's lyrics carved what I felt to be a secret message into my soul that told me what it meant to be alive. Okay, [...]

You have to live in Hamburg or Chelsea (London) or SoHo (New York) or Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Köln or the like to have a Taschen book store, because they like being fancy. (The rest of you must make do with the website.) But behind the books that cost $1500 and the piles of bountiful, oversized photo books—many of which are delightful! The revised Helmut Newton book really is incredible—are extremely affordable titles by the publisher-purveyor. Their "Basic Art" and "Basic Architecture" series are usually priced at $9.99, which surely has to be at a loss. And they're great for us who know a [...]

It's high-time there was a long appreciation written about Jason Statham. I do not care why particularly, I just love him.