"Apparently the avenues by which lusty millennials come to grope and perchance know one another are brusque, confused and rife with deception, and probably aren’t reliable precursors to unions of enduring bliss. Which is to say: they’re as imperfect as they’ve always been. While we Homo sapiens have paired off in diverse methods across disparate epochs, we’ve seldom done it with ample information or any particular finesse. There was no saner, better yesteryear: just a different set of customs, a different brand of clumsiness." —The Times'Frank Bruni talks sense in the wake of the Manti Te'o scandal and that other recent example of our semi-annual bout [...]
"There are some people partial to direct messages on Twitter and others oblivious to that corner of the Twitterverse. There are some who look at Facebook messages before anything else, and others whose Facebook accounts are idle, deceptive vestiges [...]
"Romney is going to have to define a vision of modern capitalism. He’s going to have to separate his vision from the scandals and excesses we’ve seen over the last few years. He needs to define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues. Let’s face it, he’s not a heroic entrepreneur. He’s an efficiency expert. It has been the business of his life to take companies that were mediocre and sclerotic and try to make them efficient and dynamic. It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them [...]
"They weren’t thinking about fusion per se. They were thinking about New York and approaching terroir, a French concept usually applied to the climate and natural harvest of a given area, in a new way. What ethnic foods had come to co-exist in, and define, the terroir of this city? The answer: Almost every kind. Their take on chicken fra diavolo gets some of its heat from sriracha, an Asian pepper blend. It sits on a slick of un-Italian yogurt." —Frank Bruni's article about Torrisi Italian Specialties in this weekend's Times Magazine starts out seeming like a profiley thing about a hit restaurant, but gets into a more [...]
The Observer is reporting that New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni is leaving that position to become an editor-at-large at the Times Magazine. Bruni's rumored replacement on the food beat is a previously unknown reviewer named Charlie Thin, who is said to favor Mexican cuisine.
"His demons have been dancing across the national stage for nearly two decades, since he emerged on Capitol Hill as the tantrum-prone enfant terrible of the mid-1990s Republican revolution. They’ve done the jitterbug, tango and gavotte, and at this late date can’t have too many new moves left or much more leg to show." —Frank Bruni says that the public's familiarity with New Gingrich will play to his favor in his primary race against boring ol' Mitt Romney. As scary as this is (and, man, look at the face on that female newt after she chases off an unwanted dance partner in her fishtank), I think Bruni's right [...]
Mark your calendars for Monday, December 7th, when novelist/polemicist Jonathan Safran Foer and former New York Times restaurant critic/recovering bulimic Frank Bruni will have a conversation at the JCC in Manhattan on whether or not it is moral to throw up animals.
