For Christmas I received one of those remarkable books whose lack of wide readership is nearly as remarkable. There was, however, at least one other person who received Jacques Lusseyran's And There Was Light from my girlfriend this Christmas, thanks to the ease with which Amazon allowed her to fire...

My grandmother, a great rememberer of birthdays and anniversaries, once gave me a "birthday book," essentially a calendar in which to list friends' and family members' important dates, after I had expressed admiration for a similar book she kept in her kitchen. While technology...

Time runs out this coming Saturday, February 19, on what seems easy to call one of the most absorbing art events in recent memory. Christian Marclay's The Clock is a 24-hour long film in which each minute consists of clips from movies where the...

The news that the designer of New York's famous Greek-key coffee cup, Leslie Buck, has died brought with it, for me, the embarrassing realization that I have never--until today--drunk coffee from such a cup. Embarrassing, I guess, because one who...

Since moving to New York in 2007, I have been following with somewhat obsessive interest the spread of good coffee across the city. By good coffee I suppose I mainly mean good espresso, made on a manual machine by people who care. Naturally, this rules out Starbucks, whose turn toward...

Two Saturdays ago, at the unaccustomed hour of 7:45 a.m., I found myself near the end of a long line of seventeen-year olds--and one alarmingly bearded man who looked even older than I am--which began at the stage of high-school auditorium south of Gramercy Park and ended in the school's...

It is rare that I go a second time to a movie I didn't enjoy the first time, but in the case of My Dinner With Andre, I suspected the fault might be with me and not with the movie. Like the Parisian audience at an Arthur Rubinstein recital who...

Taking my seat at a reading of Edward Albee's 1971 play All Over last weekend, I noticed a familiar figure in the seat behind me: white hair, mustache, narrow frame, and the plain attire (button-down shirt, khakis, Rockports, tube socks) of a man who needs only words to distinguish himself....

Though I recently gave into the iPhone, I was for many years a Nokia man. And for most of those years I contented myself with the default ring tone, known simply as the "Nokia tune." This tune, which you have heard nineteen times this week, goes something like: yada da...

Leaving for a wedding in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, last weekend, I decided it was finally time to read a book whose jacket and title had piqued my curiosity some years before: Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch by Henry Miller. I had seen the book lying in a hotel...

John Eliot Gardiner, the redoubtable British conductor, brought his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique to Carnegie Hall twice this past week to perform Haydn's oratorios The Seasons and The Creation. If the first concert, which I missed, was anywhere near as good as the second, which I heard Saturday night, there...

The weather last night could scarcely have been more perfect for the Metropolitan Opera's opening night broadcast in Times Square. Between the music -- Tosca -- the pleasant temperature, the multilingual crowd, and the absence of cars, Times Square felt as much like a piazza as it is ever likely...

Being a little behind in my reading, I have only recently started getting through the books I received for my birthday last year. One of these, Bordeaux/Burgundy: A Vintage Rivalry, was an excellent short book by a geographer and former president of the Sorbonne, Jean-Robert Pitte. Of the many interesting...

In several scenes in Muriel Barbery's excellent novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Renee, a Parisian concierge, and her housekeeper friend Manuela meet for tea. "I make coffee that we shall not drink," writes Renee, the narrator, "but its wafting odor delights us both, and in silence we sip a...

One of the curious features of life in New York is the way certain activities and establishments, appealing though they may be, acquire a popularity disproportionate to their merits, while others remain obscure despite their good qualities. I suppose this phenomenon, which could simply be called the herd mentality, must...

I will probably alienate myself from most of humanity by saying that the beach has never really been my thing. On my first visit to one, I am told, my ten-month-old toes recoiled from the sand at first touch, as if in shock at this unnatural substance.

Though we...

Strolling down Lexington Avenue in the 80s last night, I encountered what appeared to be a crime scene. Police tape surrounded the east side of the street from J. Lascoff, the drugstore, to Yummy Mummy, a maternity store. On the opposite sidewalk a television crew and a small crowd had...