SO, what’ll it be tonight? How about a Smoke Signal made with bacon-infused rye, chipotle syrup, cold-brewed coffee ice and porter? Or the Grillo Canción, an exotic and possibly deranged member of the Collins family that fuses pisco, cumin syrup, citrus and celery bitters? Or maybe a Knot Twist…

L awrence Kasdan’s Silverado gets my vote for most underrated modern Western. It’s got everything an oater should have: gunfights, robberies, murders, wisecracks for days, and real, honest-to-goodness heart. There are funny cowboys facing off against tough but evil ranchers, duels to the death for…

Steve Rhodes David Foster Wallace giving a reading at All Saints Church, San Francisco, 2006 The following conversation is drawn from an interview I did with David Foster Wallace in September 2006 as part of a series of articles and radio pieces about important foreign writers, artists, and movie…

I have very few rules in life, but this is one of them: Any time a team chokes away the NBA Finals 11 months after throwing a “Welcome Party” for itself, and it happens on the same night that Matt Stone and Trey Parker win 35 Tony Awards, I have to wake up at 5 a.m. the next morning and write a…

The audience at a show featuring Disney characters. Joachim Ladefoged/VII, for The New York Times Something you learn rearing kids in this young millennium is that the word “Disney” works as a verb. As in, “Do you Disney?” Or, “Are we Disneying this year?” Technically a person could use the terms in…

F act: The Decision was the best thing that happened to the NBA in 15 years. Fact: The year leading up to The Decision spiked TV ratings, boosted Internet traffic, provoked an onslaught of media opinion and generated more mainstream interest than any NBA storyline since Kobe and Shaq had a year-long…

MIAMI -- There once was a man who enjoyed being the center of attention. He made a guest appearance on "Entourage." He nailed his two lines. The photo shoot he did for Maxim was, well, an attention grabber. With his 6-foot-11 frame sprawled out on expensive furniture in a posh beachfront home, he…

The World Science Festival this past week was another triumph of cultural cross-pollination, but I’m afraid there was one missed opportunity to bring art and science together. If only someone had thought to put Daniel Boulud and Nathan Myhrvold on the same stage, we could have considered the…

Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew. But,…

Tom Gauld “The Hangover Part II” arrives much like a hangover — bludgeoning, harsh and relentless — yet it’s a notable, even groundbreaking film. It represents the logical evolution of a roughly five-year trend: someone has finally dared to make a mainstream American comedy in which nothing funny…

Life has three certainties: death, taxes and massively successful films getting a sequel. Therefore, it was no surprise that director Todd Phillips was asked to make The Hangover Part II. After all, 2009’s The Hangover not only reset the bar for gross-out comedy, but it was also a film that cost a…

I have a problem. I get anxious anytime I see a notification badge on my iPhone. Be it Mail, Reeder or something else, those little red circles really get under my skin. I check my email constantly, am always refreshing Twitter and love marking RSS feeds as read just to kill the little bastards. I —…

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt unless otherwise labeled] Anyone who moves around in burgercentric circles knows of the battle that's been brewing for the last few years between the three major heavyweights of the high-quality fast-food burger* world. Of the three, In-N-Out Burger , founded in…

When The Office premiered in March 2005 the national unemployment rate was 5.4%. GDP had grown for 14 consecutive quarters. The Dow was at 10,200 and climbing steadily (Staples had a price of about $22 a share). And yet, though the economy was relatively strong, job satisfaction had dropped to about…

Thrilling finishes have propelled the once-dominant Indians to baseball's best record. Mark Duncan/Associated Press CLEVELAND — Two flags hang from each lamppost on Ontario Street here, outside the home of the best team in baseball. On one side is a head shot of a smiling Cleveland Indians player.…

Any television show put on against American Idol has a hard row to hoe. Put it on mid-season, things get tougher. So maybe that was enough to doom Paul Reiser’s return to TV, no matter how good his show might have been. Reiser complains that NBC didn’t give the show a chance, giving him a bad time…

Raised in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan, writer/director/author Paul Feig channeled his awkward adolescent experiences into the NBC show Freaks And Geeks , which aired just 12 episodes in 1999-2000 before being cancelled. The show has since become a cult favorite, and launched the…

Michael Combs, second from left, and Dianne Vavra, with their children, Tom and Eve Combs, in their living room in Huntington, N.Y. Yana Paskova for The New York Times IT was a vision of family togetherness out of a Norman Rockwell painting, if Rockwell had worked in the era of WiFi. After a taco…

It’s amazing we are at a point where I will see half a dozen long form reviews of a two dollar application flood my RSS feed. Are we so desperate to save 1-5 dollars that we devote an hour to reading different perspectives on simple cheap apps? The web and the iOS app store have fueled the fire when…

Manny Ramirez, an 18-year-old from the Dominican Republic known for his fast swing and prodigious power, starred at George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan in 1991. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Hero. Cheat. Prodigy. Ingrate. Free spirit. Knucklehead. Hall of Famer. Pariah. Enigma. Manny…