Tell peo­ple your only mar­ketable skill is writ­ing, they tell you to write a book. No. You tell one of those insane peo­ple who sug­gests you write a book that the only book you’re going to write is going to be about not writ­ing. He says, “I’d read that.” Oth­ers agree. You think back over your non-illustrious career, […]

Back in the day, I had a lot of flashes of bril­liance for mag­a­zines that I could start. One night, per­haps aided by a case of beer or well vodka, Boris and I founded Weak magazine–for the neb­bish and mal­nour­ished. Because I’m crazy and take notes even in altered states, I still have a pretty […]

Mike Mills’ new book Travel back with me, friends, to New York in the early ‘90s. The inter­net was used for email­ing and alt.something news­groups. (OK, maybe not for you, Al Gore, you were blog­ging or cre­at­ing Ama­zon. Me, I was post­ing to the Pave­ment fan list and email­ing. That’s all.) Record and comic book […]

I made this split pea and parsnip soup last night that was so vile-looking. Luck­ily, Ryan thought the same thing I did and when I said, “You know what this reminds me of?” he said, “The sludge in Bet­ter Off Dead?” I thought for sure that had to be on YouTube but no dice. YouTubers […]

Inspired by this post at Shel­ter­rific, I just baked four dozen cook­ies. But mine are really weird! In the top photo you’ll notice that my cook­ies look par­tially raw. Which is what the recipe says might hap­pen. Still, it goes against all my bak­ing intu­ition. In the sec­ond photo, note that I have three different […]

What’s some­thing you bought, know­ing it was a total waste of money? I have owned some remark­ably adorable-but-impractical shoes. The most egre­gious exam­ples have been sold on ebay, but only after hav­ing been worn a hand­ful of times–and get­ting tons of compliments.