11 Madison Park is either a very good restaurant or the absolute best restaurant in New York City. It depends on whom you ask. But don't ask me: I've only had a drink at 11 Madison Park, and that drink was a Long Island Iced Tea. It came in a highball with four perfect cubes of ice and a wedge of lemon. It cost sixteen dollars and tasted just like college.

"I haven't served one of these in six months," the bartender told me. Like his peers at the other fine New York bars and restaurants where I have lately been ordering Long Island Iced Teas, he had repeated my [...]

In the introduction to Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette, first published in 1952, the author asks: "Who needs a book of etiquette?" Her answer: "Everyone does." The question has not aged well. She should have inquired of the future: "Who needs this 60-year-old etiquette book?" The answer: "Society people in 2013, because they wear tennis shoes outside of the racquet club."

Ms. Vanderbilt was too accommodating to the march of time, as the 1962 edition of her book included a section on bowling. Perhaps she should have also detailed the proper manners for youths who wish to pass drug cigarettes around the unisex bathroom whilst between frames. I’m fairly [...]

"Most public health people think that the ends justify the means" is how Florida International University's Bill Darrow explains why it was okay for Randy Shilts' publisher to completely over-bake the idea of Gaëtan Dugas being the "Patient Zero" of HIV. Everyone at the time knew this wasn't possibly a true idea, that one handsome flight attendant was responsible for hopping around the globe, spreading HIV. Yet the idea stuck. And apparently everyone is okay with it, and besides, he was dead anyway by 1984, and couldn't sue for libel. But anyway, that's actually not really how public health people think? Public health policy people are level-headed and statistics-oriented. [...]

Sarah Marshall and Amelia Laing are reading their way through biographies of all the American presidents, in order. This time up, it's Thomas Jefferson. Have you heard of this fellow Thomas Jefferson? He was our third President! From 1801 to 1809! And he was the father of somewhere between five and eleven children!

Amelia: Sarah Marshall left Denver this morning #lifeisterrible. We had a grand old time, though, Sarah and I. We made literally (and I do mean literally) the best bloody mary mix ever (the secret is red hot chili flakes, real grated horseradish, and three times the amount of recommended hot sauce). We were both finishing our respective [...]

Mobile phones didn't really take off until the late 1990s, but the first of the things made a telephone call on this day in 1973. According to historical sources, Motorola DynaTAC inventor Martin Cooper placed that first mobile call to a rival inventor at Bell Labs. While the conversational details are lost to history, the first guy probably said something like "I'm kind of breaking up here, did you say 'seven,' seven p.m.?" And then the next guy likely said something along the lines of, "Gah, crap, I can't hear you at all. Just text me and I'll put it on my calendar. You still there? Hello? Hellooooo?"

Sarah Marshall and Amelia Laing are reading their way through biographies of all the presidents, in order. This time up, it's John Adams and the books discussed are David McCullough's John Adams and John Ferling's John Adams: A Life.

Sarah Marshall: In the first installment of this series, Amelia and I talked about George Washington, and we both came to the conclusion that, despite the insights a biographer can afford us, it's still hard to see him as a man rather than a symbol. No matter how many self-questioning diary entries we read, we can't quite forget the image of the giant in buff and blue. Not so, [...]

"For Warrant fans. Yes, at one point, there were so many Warrant fans that they had a pay phone line. Now the singer is dead :(" —I remember when 900 numbers were a real business, now we just have Twitter. I STILL LOVE YOU WARRANT.

At the age of 15, King Edward VI was dying. For his last act as king, he excluded both of his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, from the line of succession. (To get Mary out of the line, he had to ditch them both.) His Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, was named the Queen of England.

Two days after his death, Mary raised an army of nearly twenty thousand. It took just nine days for Mary—the only child born to Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon—to correct her half-brother’s final request. Coercion by force was an effective instrument, and it would come to define her reign.

At [...]

Not long ago, MTV made an unusual appeal: It asked for help finding information about one of its own shows. The show was "Buzzkill," a hidden-camera program that ran in 1996. The plea came from MTV's Guy Code blog:

• In Impotence: A Cultural History, Angus McLaren, and leave it to a scholar named Angus, found a 17th century French midwife with a suggestion: "An enchanted husband should drink water from the mouth of a 'young stone horse.'" (To be performed, apparently, while the horse himself is drinking.) My new favorite euphemism for horny and limp is now "enchanted," but better yet: try "due benevolence" for sex. In the same study, "Nicholas Culpeper and midwife Jane Sharp recommended that a man, who due to magic could not give his wife 'due benevolence,' should piss through her wedding ring." That can’t be good for the ring. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal [...]

The first mobile call was made 40 years ago today, on a device based on the communicators used in the original "Star Trek," and the iPad was apparently introduced in 2001: A Space Odyssey, released 45 years ago this week. It's a good thing that show business invented the future for us so long ago, because god knows we can't come up with anything on our own.

City Paper: There’s a lot I don’t remember, because I was 17 years old and I managed to get served everywhere, so that was fun, plus on top of that I was an American, so I was like a thing from a zoo and everybody was trying to get me loaded.

Gerard Butler: You’re either gonna get punched or fucked.

CP: I went into a bar, I had a green shirt, and I had a jacket on over it, and I went into this bar with some friends, and I sat down and took the jacket off, and I had a green shirt with yellow sleeves, and it was [...]

The Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church are gathering, right now, to start the process of electing the next pope. Exciting stuff, eh? No, not really, to be honest! What will almost certainly happen is that this group of old ecclesiastics, all of whom were chosen by one of the last two popes, will be shut up in the mildly cramped but relatively posh digs of the Apostolic Palace, and will take a few days, tops, to come to a consensus on who the next pope will be. Maybe the winner will be a surprise, and maybe the conclave will end on the first vote for once, or will extend [...]

The year 1845 was a time of unimaginable deprivations: No smart phones, no Twitter, no Words With Friends, plus there was a lot of cholera, and those Irish street gangs, and also slavery somewhere. The Gowanus Canal was not just a repulsive sewage channel and heartbreaking symbol of environmental devastation, but a primary means of public transport through Brooklyn—construction on the great bridge to Manhattan wouldn't be begin for another quarter century. And on this day in 1845, it was probably also very cold.

For a mostly unknown writer and poet from Baltimore, January 29 was one of his last good days. The New York Evening Mirror published his [...]

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was published on this day in 1925. Set on a single day in London, in June of 1923, it tells the parallel stories of Clarissa Dalloway, who is throwing a party, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked World War One veteran. A perfect high modernist work, here are some of the reasons why the book still matters.

Woolf makes us care about a fancy middle-aged lady throwing a party.

From the opening line of the book—"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."—we know we are with a married woman who is rich enough to have people around her to do errands for her. [...]

Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because every time a door closes, a few more close."

Dear Polly,

I have a big problem. Actually a multitude of big problems that have coalesced into a giant problem. I am 31, and I cannot figure out what to do with respect to my romantic life. All my friends from college/grad school are married or partnered and I feel really unwanted. I'm attractive and outgoing, which has given me the opportunity to make many, many, MANY mistakes with respect to men. In my early 20s, I dumped every single guy who seemed truly [...]

Paul Newman’s egg-gorging feat in Cool Hand Luke certainly inspires wonder (along with a tinge of disgust). And yet each time I watch the film, I struggle with a nagging question raised by that stomach-swelling exploit: Which came first, our appetite, or our drive for competitive eating? Owing to the glut of cooking competitions, food trucks racing across town serving up sliders and duck-fat tots, foodies one-upping each other on Instagram and restaurants aggressively advertising their farm-to-table bona fides (as brilliantly satirized on "Portlandia"), food culture feels increasingly competitive in the broader, non-Kobayashi sense.

As the battles unfold to perform more impressive culinary feats, whether inhaling hot dogs [...]

Last February, an iteration of the Olive Garden restaurant chain opened in Grand Forks, North Dakota. "The place is impressive," Marilyn Hagerty wrote in her curiously favorable review for the Grand Forks Herald. "The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day. The portion was generous." Hagerty's review consisted almost entirely of declarative statements of fact about the restaurant's décor, the size of its menu's portions, and practical background info intended for prospective diners. Reactions to Hagerty's subdued encomium ran the gamut of cosmopolitan condescension: from delight in her earnest sincerity to heartfelt pity.

Then in November, Pete Wells, restaurant critic for the New York [...]