An email dialogue about democracy with a fellow media grunt who, after an argument about Barack Obama’s election chances, sent this article in a message entitled, “ain’t gonna be as easy as you think.” Continue reading

A spacious, stone-floored room lined in cheap oak and pine veneer, old and poorly lacquered, shining stickily in milky light from a row of unwashed windows, high on the wall with blinds askew. In the back half of the room, wooden benches with straight backs; in front of them, a yard-sale hodgepodge of office tables. Three women in department-issue security guard jackets cluster around a computer monitor, chatting over coffee. Continue reading

Photographs from aimless wandering of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with two conscious avoidances: the 18th and 19th century European sculpture, as they belonged in the living room of an old lady who serves hard candy to visitors; and the Egyptian collection, victim of its own popularity, like skinny jeans. Continue reading

I had one of those odd I-live-in-NYC experiences today, when after covering a press conference at the Explorer’s Club I spent the day working from their board room, accompanied by, among other things, a stuffed emperor penguin and the mounted tusks of an elephant shot by Theodore Roosevelt. (A friend once gave me a tour of the Museum of Natural History’s back scenes; on the roof is a rusty iron room containing the floor-to-ceiling remains of Roosevelt’s hunts.)
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Somewhere inside Anthony Lane is the little boy he once was, and that little boy is annoying as fuck and probably doesn’t like Halloween, either.
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