“My apartment reflects my views as an architect. It is minimal, austere. The architecture doesn’t impose itself upon you. The apartment is a stage for other things to take place.”
2. “Yes, Dear. Tonight Again.”
“‘There’s a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy and frequency of intercourse,’ said Tom W. Smith, who conducted the ‘American Sexual Behavior’ study. ‘What we can’t tell you is what the causal relationship is between the two. We don’t know whether people who are happy in their marriage have sex more, or whether people who have sex more become happy in their marriages, or a combination of those two.’”
“Unlikely as it seems, Michelle Obama, the corporate lawyer with a big education, a bigger résumé and a history of high earnings, can sometimes appear to be tempering her own strong personality with a modernized version of another era’s ladylike clothes.”
4. “Frustration and Fury: Take It. It’s Free.”
“Mr. Reznor, 43, is an unlikely combination of recluse, showman, tortured Romantic, workaholic and tech geek — which may just be an effective personality for a musician in the digital age.”
5. “What You Read Is What He Is, Sort Of”
“Mr. Sedaris, who comes from North Carolina, moved here with Mr. Hamrick about a decade ago, intending to go back but deciding to stay. Mr. Sedaris has no cellphone; his land line does not have call waiting. (‘Nobody ever calls me,’ he said at the end of the afternoon. ‘The phone hasn’t rung once,’ which was true.) He neither has nor wants an e-mail address.
“He stays away from the Internet — ‘You’ll lose a whole year on the Internet, just in terms of looking things up,’ he warned — and was unnerved when he once idly typed in the name of the host of NPR’s ‘Fresh Air,’ Terry Gross, and a bunch of critical commentary came up. ‘I don’t even want to know what anybody thinks about Terry Gross,’ he said.”
6. “Street Moves, in the TV Room”
“It seems as if every channel worth its programming salt, from broadcast networks to TLC, Lifetime and Bravo, has trotted out a dance-based reality show. As an unexpected side effect, street dance is now being popularized through television and on the shows’ Web sites, and newer moves are being documented and codified in a way not seen before.”
7. “Buy Me Some Sushi and Baby Back Ribs”
“U.S. Cellular Field, Chicago — What to Order: Nothing. Your best bet is to bring a six-pack to the parking lot, and barter a cold one for a tailgater’s hot dog. Failing that, a box of Cracker Jack.”
“If a woman has two children and one is a girl, the chance that the other child is also female has to be 50-50, right? But it’s not. Cardano again: The possibilities are girl-girl, girl-boy and boy-girl. So the chance that both children are girls is 33 percent. Once we are told that one child is female, this extra information constrains the odds. (Even weirder, and I’m still not sure I believe this, the author demonstrates that the odds change again if we’re told that one of the girls is named Florida.)”
“Everyone likes a bit of gossip now and then, but Persico’s relentlessness is disconcerting. He pursues questions about when and with whom Roosevelt went to bed with the same solemnity that other historians take to the question of when and with whom he decided to go to war.”
“Metropolis is hardly the last science-fiction movie to depict the city of the future as an inferno of cruelty and dehumanization that also looks like a pretty cool place to live.”
“Fun Books About Chickens? Top 40 Dystopian Novels? Very Best Dragon Books? You’d better believe these are real Amazon lists — irresistible chiefly because they propose new ways of organizing book-reading.”
