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[The Awl]

"In the age of Pamela Anderson's ascendance, Rivers Cuomo thought it was hot that you looked like Mary Tyler Moore."

"Empathy is hard—especially, sad to say, when you are fucking someone and it's not going quite so well as you'd planned. If you add in the whole gender thing, it gets even harder. Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together. They do. And then they call each other bitches and cunts and dumb motherfuckers, assholes and alcoholics and overprivileged Ivy League elitist shits, failed writers, failed people, people with daddy issues and mommy issues and control issues and abandonment issues, just Issues, horrible Issues, Issues that cannot be forgiven; they accuse each other of crimes against God and nature and political engagement; they accuse each other of being just like their mothers (never satisfied) and their fathers (2 bold). And some of them have recording careers, so they take it public. Is that so wrong?"

Sady Doyle waxes lyrical on every girl's failed hypothetical relationship with Rivers Cuomo, The Awl

"I imagine you've seen quite a few bananafish in your day"

This day last year it was Updike. Today it's Salinger. Who will be next to go? America waits in suspense as its contemporary literary canon dwindles. I'm just kidding. Salinger's not really in the canon. But say what you will about Salinger, I discovered his books at a crucial age, and I guess you could say the eccentric, melodramatic members of the Glass family were sort of like fall-back role models for me; I found their idiosyncrasies comforting and attractive and wildly interesting, and I wanted to be like them, I wanted to emulate them, and I did. So I can't help but think that I have some Salinger in me, that his characters embedded themselves in my developing adolescent psyche, their quirky uncertainties forever to mingle in my subconscious, and in this way I suppose I owe some of myself to Salinger. Not that he would have cared.

Edit: Last night on Talk of the Nation, Sam Tanenhaus credited Salinger with discovering the voice of the Adolescent American in Catcher. He said a bunch of other complimentary things as well, and I thought that was very nice of him.

City of Dreadful Night

"Right—frugal brainwashed Obamabots, then? Not so, fast, our reporter cautions: “Paradoxically, they are also more cynical about public institutions and, arguably, about life, embracing the European notion that success is more about luck than effort.” Good Lord—it’s worse than we feared; the recession’s bred a generation of Europeans on our own shores! If nothing else, that explains the disturbing weakness among today’s youth for crappy club music."

[Chris Lehmann, on a budding generation--The Awl]

"Pete Souza, the Diane Arbus of place setting photography." -The Awl annotates the White House Flickr feed. Laugh laugh laugh.

These boots were made for staying the fuck away from normal people

"We needed the $3k barrier to entry. NEEDED. But thanks to bootleggers and overly ambitious ladies for whom 'holiday clothing' was invented, those lovely dames who think lace 'goes with' sequins, confident daughters who received exactly the right amount of love from their parents and 'love their job,' 'look good in hats' and wear hosiery in red and green, thanks to them and their SENSE OF ADVENTURE I am experiencing something I was wholly unprepared for: THIGH-HIGH BOOT MUFFIN TOP."

Mary HK Choi should have a talk with 60% of the hoes in my Lit class.

When's the last time you mailed a letter?

"C'mon, close that laptop, let's have, like, a General Foods International Coffee Moment, only without drinking that shit because its basically like the coffee version of TANG, the shit they made the Astronbauts drink before they discovered Nutrition." -Joe MacLeod, a.k.a Mr. Wrong, on talking in the coffee shop. (His rants/rambles at over at The Awl are, to quote the great Rod Kimble, "number one.")