In the New Yorker...

[Jeff Wrangler]

I believe I did, too, but I often read essays twice (there are several David Foster Wallace essays I've read at least three or four times). I never read Kitchen Confidential and probably won't get around to it, but Anthony Bourdaine was an interesting writer and person.

I should do a Google search. I'm wondering if any of the restaurants written about in the article still exist.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I didn't really get the Nabokov. Was it supposed to be funny, or what? But what a wonderful name: Bodo von Falternfels. 

[serious crayons]

I should do a Google search. I'm wondering if any of the restaurants written about in the article still exist.

Well, Brasserie Les Halles, where Bourdaine describes working, is referred to in past tense in Wikipedia.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I read Calvin Trillin on the Crawfish Festival. I've always enjoyed reading him.

[serious crayons]

I?ve probably mentioned this before but he came to my paper to speak to reporters 6 or 8 years ago. Had some good stories.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I read the Anthony Bourdain anyway. I liked the mention of the grill man with a body by Michelangelo and the waiter who's a part-time underwear model. 

[Jeff Wrangler]

OK, here are two examples of New Yorker capitalization (or not), both from the Kathryn Paige Harden article (Sept. 13).

... (A]s one population geneticist put it to me, "the train has left the station--even if researchers don't fully understand what they're learning, this is how the genome is used now."

Sorry TNY, the quotation  is a complete sentence. It should start with a capital letter.

Micah, as it turned out, ... had already described the book to Steffi as "telling the right that they didn't bootstrap and telling the left that interventions are more complicated than they want to believe."

This is correct. The quotation is not a complete sentence, so it correctly begins with a lower case letter.

And here's another New Yorker-ism that's starting to annoy me. How many times a sentence starts with, "As [so-and-so] told me."

I wish I'd kept count of how often that appeared in an article I recently read, but I forget which article. 

[Front-Ranger]

I don't follow your connection between scotch and wildfires, but let be. Dewars is a perfectly acceptable/unexceptional blended scotch, very popular in bars--or at least it used to be.

But like the author said, blended scotches are gateway drugs. You start on them, but when you try single-malts, there's no going back.

To clarify, because of the wildfires, the air has smelled, and sometimes tasted, like smoke. So smoky peaty liquids are not to my liking at this time.

[Jeff Wrangler]

To clarify, because of the wildfires, the air has smelled, and sometimes tasted, like smoke. So smoky peaty liquids are not to my liking at this time.

OK, I see that now. I don't mind the smell of smoke, especially woodsmoke, but I wouldn't like the taste of it. 

[serious crayons]

Smoke from Canadian wildfires was so heavy here for a few days a couple of months ago that it looked cloudy when it was actually sunny. I don't worry much about air quality, but it's definitely bad for people who have those issues.

I'll have to say, though, the smoky sunsets were a beautiful deep orange-red.