New York Perspective: when not in the city, say when visiting any other part of the country, or the world for that matter, the New York Times is like a beacon lighting another planet of ideas and sophistication. When in the city on the other hand it is not so interesting and even rather banal in its passion to be trendy.

American Sucker: one enjoys reading David Denby's melancholy movie reviews in the New Yorker. The quintessential insider who must have lunched with legions of editors and "in" people at Michael's he has published a dull book that had he not had all those lunches with all those editors would never have seen the light of day.

We all lost scads of money in the year 2000, I means scads; we have all been divorced. And so forth