Submitted For Your Perusal

“Supporting Cast Teaches Bryant to Appreciate Los Angeles”

“‘I’m very happy,’ Bryant said Saturday after the Lakers practiced at a Manhattan health club…. ‘I’m happy because we have a very close-knit group here. We’re like brothers. We all get along, so the chemistry is great.’”

“The Nike Air Force 1 Sneaker Turns 25 Years Old”

“Largely because of its popularity off the court, it has become the best-selling sneaker ever with more than 1,800 color combinations, many in limited editions that can cost thousands of dollars.”

“You Are What You Read”

“We’re not the first generation to invest reading with miraculous powers. But until radio and television dethroned the book, social reformers worried about too much reading, not too little. Advice about when and where not to read was once a medical specialty. In an 1806 diagnosis, a British doctor hypothesized that the ‘excess of stimulus’ produced by reading novels ‘affects the organs of the body and relaxes the tone of the nerves.’ Reading at the table interfered with your digestion, reading before lunch with your morals. Another expert, in 1867, warned that ‘to read when in bed … is to injure your eyes, your brain, your nervous system, your intellect.’ Cue to the other in-bed activity that makes you go blind. Like masturbation, reading was too pleasurable for its own good; like masturbation, it threatened to upstage real human contact (messy, tedious, disappointing) with virtual pleasures.”

“Remembrance of Things Unread”

“In the season of gift-giving, the ratio of books bought to books read tilts heavily toward the bought.”

The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies

“A picture could sit for many, many years, cool and comfortable, until some enterprising executive decided that the time was ripe for, say, a Wallace Beery special collection timed to a 25th-anniversary 3-D rerelease of Barton Fink, with a hitherto unseen, behind-the-scenes peek at the Coen brothers trying to explain a Hollywood in-joke to John Turturro.

“It was a file-and-forget system that didn’t cost much, and made up for the self-destructive sins of an industry that discarded its earliest works or allowed films on old flammable stock to degrade. (Indeed, only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survive.)

“But then came digital. And suddenly the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren’t as durable as they used to be.”

“True Religion Outlet Jeans”

“There was a time when outlet centers were associated with the grubby matter of liquidating unsold merchandise to unglamorous bargain hunters in a low-rent building in the middle of nowhere. Clearly this image has evolved, and many apparel makers even manufacture products specifically for their outlet channels.”

“Stopping at 10 Just Seems Wrong”

“Everyone knows that this is an arbitrary and subjective exercise — that’s part of the fun of it — but this year I’ve found it especially difficult to commit to so narrow and exclusive a list.”

“A List, to Start the Conversation”

“Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood,’ which I will write about in detail when it opens on Wednesday, and David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac,’ which I wrote about when it was released in March, together constitute my 1 through 10.”

“Of Radiohead and ‘Rehab,’ ‘1234’ and Calle 13”

Top Songs: M.I.A. “Paper Planes” (XL); SHAKIRA “Hay Amores” (New Line); JONI MITCHELL “Hana” (Hear Music); KANYE WEST “Stronger” (Roc-A-Fella); NEIL YOUNG “No Hidden Path” (Reprise).

Few Big Albums, but Small Ones Sounded Just Fine

Top Songs: RIHANNA “Umbrella” (Def Jam); R. KELLY FEATURING T.I. AND T-PAIN “I’m a Flirt (Remix)” (Jive/Zomba); MARTINA MCBRIDE “Anyway” (RCA/Sony BMG Nashville); SOULJA BOY TELLEM “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” (ColliPark/Interscope); LINDA SUNDBLAD “Lose You” (Monza/Bonnier Amigo).