Symposia took a friend to lunch yesterday at Michael's on 55th, the place to be seen if you have any literary associations, a clubby sort of place, like the infinitely more charming Riccardo's used to be in Chicago when Studs and Royko and Clarence Page and Basil Talbot and a million Pulitzer winners lunched and drank daily. Michael's is 2005 New York--soulless, pretentious, with overpriced food (the nicoise contained blood red slabs of utterly tasteless tuna and rock hard haricots verts).

We all know tuna is laced with toxic mercury so the Tuna People are spending 25 million this year to create a campaign to neutralize the truth.