Put down your magazines!

Everybody's not-reading! Jason Kottke on not-reading about Donatella Versace! Gawker on Kottke not-reading!

Also, isn't there something delightfully muppet about the original DV?

who looks funny?

I hate the cover of the style issue. To the point where I might tear it off and throw it away. Sometimes funny and fashion don't happen.

Sometimes they do; I kept up a steady chuckle reading Henry Alford on the solar panelled jacket. That's just the abstract.

The article itself opens with "History has not been kind to garments that serve a function other than that of keeping their wearers warm or unnaked or adorable." Too true.

And yet, I think he's right in his enthusiasm for the solar panels in his new jacket. I think that there is a secret desire that clothes should become more like computers and bikes and our bodies and DO something. They have too much to-be-looked-at-ness so to speak. Fashion isn't even, usually, 3 dimensional enough, for god's sake.

The only other Donatella Versace profile I ever read was in TNY - when and by whom? And why does Lauren Collins not even mention that it's been done? Or does she? I lost interest.

Basics, but as usual so smart. James Surowiecki. On fasion, copyright, and the capitalist temporality of the trend.

And what else is news?

Electic Warrior is reading the NYT Sunday Style Magazine, or at least looking at the pictures, and thinks you should too.

The Determined Dilettante isn't reading that rather dull thing about olive oil, is reading something interesting from Mark Singer, which is in an issue of TNY that I misplaced.

Juniper Pearl's abiding love for TNY is tested by Adam Gopnik's drive to eat local.

Kitchenography entertains the Live Chicken! fantasy (past the recipe).

Sepoy declares, "I am sticking to not-reading NYT’s editorial page." Or did declare this in a heated moment.

picky eaters

My mother, NOT the only person I know who makes unintentional pastry-themed puns, described much of the September food issue of The New Yorker as "fillers" and "fluffy."

But she recommended the Claudia Roden article and so I read it and now I recommend it too. I especially like it when the author presses the point with Roden about what actually makes a recipe authentic. (103)

I also liked a short portion of McPhee's article, about a diet of edible wild plants. (87-88)

And I liked the beginning and end of Acocella on the Dante translation. When she was talking about the actual translation, and the notes. (127 & 131-33)

I loved (not in the food issue, but relevant) John Seabrook, "Annals of Agriculture, Sowing for the Apocalypse, The creation of a global seed bank" about the politics and history of monoculture and seed banks. Aug 27 (60-71)

In that same issue was the sort of unsatisfying Alex Ross on Copland, which ended beautifully, when it stopped trying to be so historical. (40)

And Paul Goldberger's "Retro Opulence on Central Park West" had a lot of zingers.

My mother also thought Thurman's colonic spa thing was a testament to what is wrong with the world today. I read it first thing.

And, if, as Emdashes' link suggests, Gopnik's essay in the food issue was him implying that other people are "privileged, nostalgic and naive" I definitely have to read it.