Seth's Blog

• Bruce Handy (who wrote for Spy) on Newsweek. “The second biggest problem is the way each issue begins with a miles-long slog of columns by A-list writers eager to champion the incontrovertible and rehash the already thoroughly hashed. . . . Niall Ferguson has discovered that, thanks to technology, “the human race is interconnected as never before.””
• The Willat Effect in Venice, CA: side-by-side coffee comparisons at Intelligensia .
• Why is the headline 28 Unexpected TV Ratings Facts more attractive than Unexpected TV Ratings Facts?
• Engaging interview with Julia Schopick, creator of Honest Medicine. “After they [his surgeons] were done with him . . . “

• The Shangri-La Diet: still too good to be true. It was my dream — and maybe every scientist’s dream — to discover something (a) useful and (b) counter-intuitive, the more surprising the better. It did not occur to me that (a) and (b) conflict. I think that more surprising discoveries are eventually more useful (as logic suggests), but it takes much longer.
• Marisa Tomei wants to play Jane Jacobs. “I love that she saved Greenwich Village.” When she does, perhaps Robert Caro will post the unpublished Jane Jacobs chapter of The Power Broker.
• Symposium on The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
• Did you know that Mindy Kaling’s amusing article in this week’s New Yorker is an excerpt from a forthcoming book? Neither did I. Likewise, the recent Murakami story Town of Cats was from a forthcoming book. The New Yorker, unlike other magazines, never identifies book excerpts. This  is unfortunate because doing so would help both writers (sell books) and readers (find books to read). For more criticism of  The New Yorker, see the great book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker by Renata Adler.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

I loved Ned Zeman’s new book The Rules of the Tunnel, which I read during a long plane flight. Not only does it combine three of my favorite subjects — high-end magazines, bipolar disorder, and the crappiness of modern psychiatry — but it’s very well-written and revealing. I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in a long time.

Zeman once wrote for Spy, as did I. Long ago, I met him at a Spy party. I suppose I could have gotten a free copy of his book but I bought it. I wanted something great to read on the plane.

Edward Jay Epstein, the investigative journalist whom I praise here, offers free copies of his latest books (which include Myths of the Media, Who Killed God’s Banker?, and Armand Hammer, The Darker Side, all Amazon Kindles) to those who will write Amazon reviews. I took him up on it. You can reach him at ed ~at~ edwardjayepstein.com.

• How one obscure sentence upset the New York Times by Renata Adler. A great and revealing story. My explanation of the Times’s over-the-top hostility to Adler’s book (Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker) differs from Adler’s. She says it was due to her lack of deference, whereas I suspect currying favor with Charles McGrath, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, was a big part of it. In Gone, Adler criticized McGrath, who was apparently very upset. Gone is the rare critique that combines negativity and deep familiarity. Usually you have one or the other.
• fish oil and joint pain
• life and death consequences of job choices
• one more reason for health care stagnation. Innovations excluded by hospital purchasing groups.
• pickled vegetables and cancer. Alas.
• On the other hand, yogurt linked with lower risk of colon cancer. This study points in the same direction.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Alex Chernavsky.