John Mayer Says What We All Think

“I should be having sex with more girls.” This is what John Mayer concluded, using slightly more colorful language, last Sunday night at his anonymously modern apartment in SoHo.

Since When Do Tweens Care About The Long Run?

Right now, a startling volume of tween culture is devoted, directly or indirectly, to puttin' on a show in the manner of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. It seems important to remember that things didn't work out too well for Judy in the long run.

That's What Makes Them Monsters

These days, even monsters have handlers.

Where Typography Fears To Tread

Fueled by Nicolas Cage’s performance — which requires adjectives as yet uncoined, typed with both the caps-lock key and the italics button engaged — Mr. Herzog’s film is a pulpy, glorious mess.

Trailers Only Go Forward

A company called Circle of Seven, which produces videos for an impressive array of trash, trademarked the term book trailer in 2002, but the phrase has caught on broadly, and there will be no turning back.

It's A Shame There Are No Interviews

We know. You hate "Twilight." You don't want to hear anything more about "Twilight." That's why this is not another story about the "Twilight" or "New Moon" mania, nor will it rhapsodize on the vampire craze, nor does it contain any interviews with Robert Pattinson.

This is a story about shame.

My Motto

Language may change, but pedantry is forever.

Cheaper, Though

Books about wine are no substitute for drinking wine.

Just Who Is On The Tenure Committee?

Spend enough time riding the New York City subway—or any big-city metro—and you'll find yourself on the tenure-track to an honorary degree in transit psychology.

All The News Fit To Depress Me

Black metal and doom metal are musical styles, but they are also modes of being. They’re body and brain and nature. That furious black-metal clog of screams, strums and beats is rain or wind or anxiety or catatonic excitement. That deep-frequency doom-metal drone is the unfathomable drag of eternity: the Creator’s cello sawing away for a billion more choruses than you’ll ever get to hear. One’s a head sound, one’s a chest sound. They’re infinite wells of culture and meaning. They won’t go away.

Too Many Gamers Spoil the Wii

That is because the various player-controlled characters, including the brothers themselves, bounce off one another to their doom, push one another off ledges and shove one another into killer monsters. It can be very difficult for players (like the people I invited to my home to play) to keep track of their characters on the screen. In a game that requires precise control and punishes the slightest mistake with death, the multiplayer mode generates exponential confusion.

The Promise Of Better Things

“You can’t help but get weary” when working for Mr. Corman, Mr. Howard said in celebrating the executive who gave him a first directing job, on “Grand Theft Auto,” in 1977.

Mr. Howard recalled Mr. Corman’s telling him, “If you continue to do a good job for me on this picture, I can promise you, you’ll never have to work for me again.”

Can't Help Looking Back

The world of such poker software, along with poker telecasts, poker blogs, poker chat rooms, poker sites offering both low and high stakes, threatens to supplant the kind of duffer’s paradise enjoyed by American presidents and by generations of small-town, small-time friends. (I sigh with nostalgia.)

Don't Look Back

Kingsolver doesn’t dwell much on her greatest hits. “My fondness for my own first novel is enhanced by the fact that I don’t ever read it,” she wrote recently in a Q. and A. on her publisher’s Web site.