1. “50 Years of Dizzy, Courtesy of Hitchcock”

“You can’t help wondering what those first Bay Area viewers 50 years ago must have thought as they watched this strange, drifty, hallucinatory romance unfold on the big screen, with the strains of Bernard Herrmann’s lush score — brazenly echoing the ‘Liebestod’ from Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’ — swelling on the soundtrack. It wasn’t what they had come to expect from Hitchcock, the beloved portly ‘master of suspense,’ who had been making impishly macabre thrillers for 30-some years and had since 1955 also been the host and impresario of a very popular mystery-story anthology series on television.”

2. “At a Haven for Creative Souls, a Prolific Talent Is Affirmed”

“After two months, Mr. Bassett finally entered No. 503 to find that Ms. Grossman was, in fact, fiercely guarding an apartment nearly stuffed to the ceiling with hundreds of boxes, forcing her to live in her hallway and sleep on a deck chair. The boxes turned out to be jam-packed with a voluminous body of artwork, which Ms. Grossman had produced in her prime in New York and Europe.”

3. “Niko Bellic vs. Britney Spears and Indiana Jones”

“Wall Street analysts expected it to sell about five million copies in its first two weeks. Instead, it sold 3.6 million copies in just one day, April 29.”

4. “Gasol Ceding the Spotlight, but Still Shining”

“Bryant communicates with Gasol in Spanish on the court, but that is not why they have clicked. Their collaboration works because they are so fluent in basketball that neither one has to say much to the other.”

5. “For Griffey, the Roads Not Taken”

“His opportunity to challenge Ruth and Aaron has come and gone.”

6. “Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours.”

“In setting the tone for ‘Swingtown,’ its producers … said they aimed to combine the raucous abandon of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of ‘The Wonder Years,’ the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing in the late ’60s and early ’70s.”

7. “Mike Tyson Film Takes a Swing at His Old Image”

“But does the public have any appetite left for Mr. Tyson? Muhammad Ali, an Olympic hero with political cachet, has been feted in his postboxing life. Mr. Tyson, on the other hand, has been (unfairly perhaps) dismissed as a mere fighting machine.”

8. “Special Effects From the Real World”

“He acquired the rights to the film, and, he said, ‘I started to collect visuals.’

“‘It took me about 16 years,’ he added. In the meantime, he continued to work in commercials, for clients like Levi’s, Nike and MTV, as well as directing music videos for groups like Green Day and R.E.M.”

9. “1958: The War of the Intellectuals”

“In ‘The Un-Angry Young Men,’ an essay in the British monthly Encounter in 1958, Leslie Fiedler wrote that American popular culture ‘has never been in a duller or less promising condition.’ Meanwhile, ‘everyone, and not least the highbrows, wants to read about popular culture’ — to the point that ‘the study of popular culture threatens itself to become a branch of popular culture.’”

10. “Lexicographical Longing”

“As of now, Oxford University Press has no official plans to publish a new print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.”

(Via Coudal.)

1. “Before Hours in the City That Always Sleeps In”

“This whole city-that-never-sleeps thing — on target when you’re looking for a place to dance at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, eat at 4 a.m. on a Wednesday or do yoga at 5 a.m. on a Thursday — can get a little dicey come 6 or 7 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.”

2. “Soccer Star’s Misadventure Leaves His Fans Smirking”

“For those fans, the essence of the so-called beautiful game is deeply masculine, and its big-name players are expected to be exemplars of heterosexuality.”

3. “At College, a High Standard on Divorce”

“College officials say, and students seem to agree, that it is appropriate to require members of their voluntary religious community to adhere to Christian standards of behavior. The controversy here is over what to do when the messiness of life gets in the way.”

4. “Dressed for a Meeting, Ready for Mayhem”

“From streets to stairwells, garbage bins to muddy riverbanks, the tradition of the dapper detective runs through years of law enforcement, surviving the rough-and-tumble of gritty streets and a trend in recent years toward dress-down Fridays and casual attire.

“Never mind that it can seem incongruous to wear business attire to make arrests, scrutinize the blood and debris of a murder scene, and confront killers and thieves.”

5. “New Album, New Fears, Same Old Attitude”

“I’m kind of like W .E. B. Du Bois/Meets Heavy D & the Boyz.”

6. “Here Comes Everyboy, Again”

“The male rejection of adulthood is now the dominant attitude in Hollywood comedy, even (or perhaps especially) in movies whose sexual frankness makes them officially unsuitable for children. Occasionally you will see a functioning if beleaguered dad, usually a widower, like Steve Carell’s character in Dan in Real Life. And sometimes, as in Little Miss Sunshine, a coeducational, multigenerational ensemble will carry the therapeutic and satirical burdens of the genre.

“But far more often the center of attention will be a guy, his buddies and his toys. He will, most of the time, be nudged toward responsibility, forgiven for his quirks and nurtured in his needs and neuroses by a woman who represents an ideal amalgam of supermodel and mom.

“It would be hypocritical of me to dismiss the appeal of this fantasy and silly to deny that a lot of these movies manage to be both very funny and disarmingly insightful about the male psyche. But I suspect I’m not alone in growing weary of the relentless contemplation of that psyche in its infantile state, and of the endless celebration of arrested development as a social entitlement.”

7. “Is There a Real Woman in This Multiplex?”

“Last year only 3 of the 20 highest-grossing releases in America were female-driven, and involve a princess (Enchanted) or pregnancy (Knocked Up and Juno). Actresses had starring roles in about a quarter of the next 80 highest-grossing titles, mostly in dopey romantic comedies and dopier thrillers. A number of these were among the worst-reviewed movies of the year, including Premonition (Sandra Bullock) and The Reaping (Hilary Swank), the last of which was released by — ta-da! — Warner Brothers. The days of Million Dollar Baby, for which Ms. Swank won an Oscar, and Speed, which rocketed Ms. Bullock to stardom in the summer of 1994, feel long gone.”

8. “Back to the City, for More Than Just Sex”

“One aspect of the women’s depiction that remains fixed is the sense that they have emerged from nowhere, with no lives to speak of before they were old enough for snakeskin and small dresses with tinier straps. Of all the fantastical elements contained in the series — the recherché clothing, the ample inventory of good-looking men — none seemed more mythic than the idea that Carrie and her friends existed apart from any notions of genealogy. In its refusal to incorporate parents, ‘Sex and the City’ always seemed to resemble most closely the classics of children’s literature.

“While the film revolves around Carrie and Big’s wedding, Mr. King was insistent that no mother or father of the bride be shown. ‘My idea always was that these women were purely creations of New York,’ he said. ‘The prototype of the series is that these are four grown-ups who make a family of one another.’”

9. “Indiana Jones and the Savior of a Lost Art”

“The tone and style of the films derive from the movie serials of the 1930s and ’40s, which Mr. Spielberg, growing up in the ’50s, used to see on Saturday mornings at a revival theater in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“‘They made a great impression on me, both because of how exciting they were and because of how cheesy they were,’ he said. ‘I’d kind of be involved in the stories and be ridiculing them at the same time. One week they’d give us a cliffhanger with the good guy going off the cliff, the car crashing on the rocks below and blowing up, and then the next week he’s fine. They forgot to show us the cut of the guy jumping out of the car? That we weren’t going to do in the Indiana Jones series.’

“In fact, Mr. Spielberg said, he tries to cut as little as possible in these movies’ action sequences, because ‘every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there’s something wrong, that there’s some cheating going on.’ So his goal is ‘to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut.’

“Warming to the subject, he went on: ‘The idea is, there’s no illusion; what you see is what you get. My movies have never been frenetically cut, the way a lot of action is done today. That’s not a put-down; some of that quick cutting, like in The Bourne Ultimatum, is fantastic, just takes my breath away. But to get the comedy I want in the Indy films, you have to be old-fashioned. I’ve studied a lot of the old movies that made me laugh, and you’ve got to stage things in full shots and let the audience be the editor. It’s like every shot is a circus act.’”

10. “Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise”

“The proliferating number of blogs, user-generated content services and online news sources has created a dense information jungle that no human could machete his or her way through in a lifetime, let alone in an afternoon of surreptitious procrastination at work.”

11. “Not on Our Blog You Won’t”

“The Jezebel blog was founded last spring by Gawker Media as a smart, feisty antidote to traditional women’s magazines (or ‘glossy insecurity factories,’ as Jezebel describes them). It quickly developed a loyal following and has seen an influx of new visitors, after being name-checked on the official blog for ‘Gossip Girl,’ the prime-time soap opera.”

12. “His Father’s Siren, Still Singing”

“Shortly afterward, Nabokov’s editor at McGraw-Hill revealed that the author was about to do the actual writing, in pencil on 3-by-5-inch index cards (Nabokov never worked with a typewriter).”

13. “A Fiery Theology Under Fire”

“Black liberation theology was, in a sense, a brilliant flanking maneuver. For a black audience, its theology spoke to the centrality of the slave and segregation experience, arguing that God had a special place in his heart for the black oppressed. These theologians held that liberation should come on earth rather than in the hereafter, and demanded that black pastors speak as prophetic militants, critiquing the nation’s white-run social structures.”

14. “An Animated Life”

“Procrastination technique: I heard David Sedaris say he couldn’t write in the afternoons because he would spend hours looking in the mirror trying to find where his hair parts. Me? I troll iTunes. That’s a time sink.”

15. “Hoop Data Dreams”

“Basketball, meanwhile, might seem too hectic and woolly for such rigorous dissection. It is far more collaborative than baseball and happens much faster, with players shifting from offense one moment to defense the next. (Hockey and football present their own challenges.) A lot of things happen on a basketball court — picks, passes, defensive shifts — that aren’t routinely quantified. This is not to suggest that basketball teams don’t think statistically. But only recently have a few teams begun to hire a new breed of stathead to scrutinize every conceivable variable.”

16. “This Joke’s for You”

“It’s interesting to consider the Brawndo project as metasubversion, making it possible to express knowing amusement at the absurdity of American commerce by buying something. But maybe the message is simply that cautionary tales about dumbed-down culture are a futile endeavor: show us an argument that we will buy anything, no matter how idiotic, and we say, ‘Awesome — how much for that?’”

17. “Blame the Messager”

“If you want a decent R.S.V.P., you may have to resort to the tactic of a British friend of White’s: ‘Print engraved invitations, on the thickest stock,’ she suggested, her voice dropping to an awe-struck whisper. ‘The regrets were handwritten.’”

Ben Mathis-Lilley asks, “Why do rappers whose work I hold in such high regard have such terrible taste in rock?” His answer, that middlebrow rock artists “are seen by their hip-hop collaborators … as living samples, picked out of the musical spectrum because their voices have some distinctive quality,” is a good one.

“One reason that I try never to wear a tie is the advantage that it so easily confers on anyone who goes berserk on you. There you are, with a ready-made noose already fastened around your neck. All the opponent needs to do is grab hold and haul.” —Christopher Hitchens

“I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism – of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

“In my own case, I have written a few books built to a great extent on other writers’ books. Where the blurry line between a paraphrase and a lift is drawn–not always so clear when composing such books – has always been worrisome to me. True, I’ve never said directly that man is a political animal, or that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Still, I worry that I may somewhere have crossed that blurry line.” —Joseph Epstein

1. “Cover Story: The King of Visceral Design”

“What was remarkable then — and seems even more so now, when virtually every magazine cover is a thicket of text lines running behind or on top of one celebrity or another — is that the Lois covers were virtually textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image. Some were untouched photographs, but, in an era before Photoshop, some were created by the primitive technique of cutting and pasting, using photographs, clip art and sometimes hand-drawn elements.”

2. “Recession Diet Just One Way to Tighten Belt”

“Burt Flickinger, a longtime retail consultant, said the last time he saw such significant changes in consumer buying patterns was the late 1970s, when runaway inflation prompted Americans to ‘switch from red meat to pork to poultry to pasta — then to peanut butter and jelly.’

“‘It hasn’t gotten to human food mixed with pet food yet,’ he said, ‘but it is certainly headed in that direction.’”

3. “Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills”

“Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She piles up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare at her like a to-do list. Classmates sling backpacks over seats, prop a window open and start cramming. Three hours later, the floor is littered with empty juice cartons and water bottles. One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At 10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus that will wend its way through Seoul’s towering high-rise canyons to her home, south of the Han River.

“‘I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,’ she said.”

4. “The Race of Truth: 40-Yard Times Can Tell the Future”

“Based on an examination of the last 10 years of data from running backs at the combine, and comparing that to the same players’ subsequent N.F.L. statistics, it is clear the 40-yard dash does help predict whether a college running back will be an effective professional.”

5. “The Spirit of ‘68”

“More than any other art form, cinema captured the energy, the truth, of the times. To an extent rarely matched before or since, filmmakers did not simply record the upheavals and crises of the time; they were participants and catalysts. None more so than Mr. Godard. It seems apt that the Film Forum and Lincoln Center programs share La Chinoise, one of a flurry of films he began, completed or released in 1968, and one in which he indulges his fondness for epigrams and proverbs. One of his slogans proclaims that with vague ideas, we need clear images.”

6. “Material Woman, Restoring Her Brand”

“Alongside whatever she has offered her audience through the years — sex, glamour, dancing, defiance, blasphemy, spirituality — Madonna has never pretended to be anything but diligent. She’s disciplined, hard-working and determined to sell. For Madonna as a pop archetype, the truest pleasure isn’t momentary physical ecstasy or divine rapture but success. She labeled that impulse too in an early tour: ‘Blonde Ambition.’”

7. “Next on His Docket: A Supreme Challenge”

“Marshall is akin to Mr. Fishburne’s many mentor-teacher figure roles, among them Furious Styles in Boyz N the Hood and Morpheus in the Matrix movies. In these roles, through his poised demeanor and his precise, confident intonation, Mr. Fishburne exudes intelligence and moral authority.”

8. “Hard Lessons Learned in the Ring”

“All fighters are sad.”

9. “Public Radio Tries to Reignite Its Public”

“‘A lot of the research that guided public radio’s direction in the last 30 years focused on us discovering a niche we could serve and serve well,’ of highly educated, news-craving listeners, said Maxie Jackson, WNYC’s senior director for program development. But, he added, that formula ‘didn’t appeal to people of color.’ He called it an issue of tonality.”

10. “Dude! Like, Those Ads Live Forever”

“For viewers the advertisements have offered a comedic crash course in the evolving vernacular of the 21st-century American male. For their creators and the brewery behind them, the spots have provided a different lesson: that young consumers are using the Internet and other technologies to express the ways they want to receive (and even control) advertising, and it’s up to advertisers to hear this message.”

11. “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Worries”

“The real boom in nude vacations is coming at the high end of the business, as upscale hotels and resorts, and even some luxury cruise lines, have begun to see the economic potential in the no-clothes crowd — particularly those who want to shed their clothes but not their pampered lifestyles.”

12. “A Literary Critic Drops His Ax and Picks Up His Pen”

“‘You have to be prepared to live on $20,000, which is not impossible, even in New York.’ (Mr. Gessen, who lives in Prospect Heights with two roommates, said he never earned more than $25,000 a year until he was 30.)”

13. “Mexican for the Soul”

“‘I like that they have a nod toward the metropolitan lifestyle, as opposed to Berlin’s more Bohemian lifestyle,’ he said as he passed around his cellphone, which displayed an image of his Parisian girlfriend in bed holding a tiny dog. ‘Paris has breakfast time and lunchtime, and disciplines like that. I find it helps the rhythm of life, and reflects what you do with your life. It has a little bit more momentum.’”

14. “From a Time Before BlackBerries”

“‘I love how it’s designed out of heavy steel but with great grace, like the Eiffel Tower. I can’t turn it at any angle where it doesn’t excite me.’”

15. “Let’s Say You Want to Date a Hog Farmer”

“The couple is among a growing number of people who have found love on dating sites that pair members based on a specific shared interest or background — sites like HorseandCountrySingles.com, Nerdsatheart.com, DateMyPet.com, STDmatch.net (for singles with sexually transmitted diseases), MatureSinglesOnly.com (for people over 50) and Veggielove.com.”

16. “When the Times Make the Man”

“[McCain] inhabits a more serious historic role, as the latest — and almost certainly the last — hope for Americans born in the 1930s to send one of their own to the White House. The 1900s, the 1910s, the 1920s and the 1940s have all been represented in the White House. But not the 1930s.

“It is the missing decade. A demographic blip? Perhaps. But it might also be that Americans born in the 1930s lack the particular qualities we look for in our national leaders.”

17. “BlackBerry’s Quest: Fend Off the iPhone”

“Since the iPhone went on sale last summer, amid long lines of shoppers and media adulation, the contours of the smartphone market have begun to shift rapidly toward consumers. An industry once characterized by brain-numbing acronyms and droning discussions about enterprise security is now defined by buzz around handset design, video games and mobile social networks.”

18. “Is Hollywood Warming to Its Favorite Villains?”

“Businesses and business people remain some of Hollywood’s most reliable villains. But the next crop of corporate heavies appears to have something attractive in its villainy. Perhaps that means a long-overdue acceptance by movie makers that at least some of those who pump oil, sell stock, run airlines and build our increasingly fuel-efficient cars are not completely without value.”

19. “The Catastrophist”

“For all of Amis’s testimonies about the transformative impact of Sept. 11 — which ‘will perhaps never be wholly assimilable,’ whatever that means — there is at least one way in which he has been thoroughly untouched by the atrocity: he is still busy with the glamorous pursuit of extraordinary sentences.”

20. “You’re an Author? Me Too!”

“But even as more people choose the phantasmagoria of the screen over the contemplative pleasures of the page, there’s a parallel phenomenon sweeping the country: collective graphomania.”

21. “Empowering by Disempowerment”

“That poster image she saw was one of many Demotivators created and sold by a company in Austin, Tex., called Despair Inc. It sells scores of posters satirizing the banalities of the motivation industry (including the inevitable cute cat clinging to something, although in this case it says: ‘Give up: At some point, hanging in there just makes you look like an even bigger loser’), along with calendars, T-shirts, a book and a clear coffee mug marked to show precisely when it’s half empty.”

Mike Albo on The Grove in LA: “The Grove is everything that is horrible and spectacular about our brand-saturated American lives. It’s a living version of every pretentious theory you may have read back in grad school: a facsimile of a space, a scripted zone, a generic city, a vituperative quote by Baudrillard or Deleuze. But it’s also totally great!”

This statement perfectly encapsulates my own feelings about The Grove.

“I continued to pursue my studies and half believed I might try for a doctorate in philosophy and become a teacher, as teaching is, after all, a form of show business.” —Steve Martin, Born Standing Up