Myriad outrageous things occurred during the two seasons of "Twin Peaks" that aired on ABC in the early 1990s. A fish somehow got stuck in a coffee percolator, a sheriff's deputy knocked himself silly by stepping on a loose board, Sherilyn Fenn tied a cherry stem into a knot with her tongue. Verbal tics and regional dialects and odd vocal registers predominated. Dwarfs and doppelgangers spoke backwards. David Duchovny showed up wearing a dress. Many of these things came off as humorous, and each episode provided at least five or six chuckle-worthy moments—which, as offsets go, is only fair, considering that the David Lynch and Mark [...]

Seven years ago, Jonathan Van Meter, the writer and Vogue contributing editor, published an essay in New York magazine called "I Hate Brooklyn." Here is how it begins:

From there, the piece proceeds to many places you'd expect (hipsters, gentrification) and, [...]

In college, I dated a girl who applied for a job at an Express store in the mall. Part of her training involved something called the "Express You! Street Verbage [sic] Guide"—an almost unbelievably wrongheaded dictionary of street terms and slang that Express management wanted sales associates to learn so as to best relate to customers. My friend, a greeter-in-training, was instructed to review and memorize it. To be fair, this was the mid-90s. Illmatic had just dropped, Mariah Carey was putting out remixes with ODB, and it was virtually impossible to avoid TLC’s “Waterfalls.” But never mind that. The guide was funny even then—and as soon as I heard [...]