"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." READ MORE

"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 of a fleeting gregariousness that didn’t survive their boredom with Rebecca’s bread dough ('It isn’t rising! Tips?') or Tim’s poison ivy ('Itching and itching! Remedies?'). I know only a handful of people with just one e-mail address, but I know many with three or more, and not all of these people understand automatic forwarding. My friend M. was recently reacquainted with an in-box unattended for a year. It was stuffed with hundreds of unread messages — some, remarkably, from people flummoxed by her aloofness."
—Frank Bruni examines the baffling complexities of communication in our new tech-savvy era. Above, a Twitter user illustrates his point quite nicely.

"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." READ MORE

Also! In other things That Should Be Read, here is an extensive exit interview with outgoing Times food critic Frank Bruni. It took place at Babbo-and, most telling about our current time, the meal's waiter wrote his own account of the meal. I'm sure the busboy has a Twitter account somewhere.

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.