In which The Gay Recluse ponders the dinosaurs.
In today’s New York Times, in a shocking piece that has vaulted all the way to number one on the “Most Popular” chart, we learn that golf is on the way out; declining in a popularity, with too many courses built in the 90s, it’s no longer feasible [...]

Gail Collins/Notes from a Caucus
The Short Version: Caucuses are dumb.
In her words: “Most people have never been to a caucus, even if their state happens to have them.”
Score: B+
We weren’t dying of laughter or anything, but Collins made us smile a few times — e.g., “The parking lot was also accommodating the audience for the [...]

In which The Gay Recluse writes about the Democratic primaries in highly attenuated metaphors.
Regular readers of The Gay Recluse know that we have reported on the fierce and unsettled debate over which Clementine — the Sweetie® from Mulholland Citrus or Cuties® from Sun Pacific — provides the most delightful and refreshing citrus “experience.” Initially we [...]

In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinion columns in The New York Times.
Paul Krugman/The Edwards Effect
The Short Version: The Democrats have John Edwards to thank for providing most of the substantive ideas on which Hillary and Barack are now running.
In his words: “He made a habit of introducing bold policy proposals — and they [...]

There is something oddly unsatisfying about The Master, Colm Toibin’s 2004 treatment of the life of Henry James. Odd because we almost always love Toibin’s prose, which is elegant but unpretentious, and — unlike so much contemporary fiction — never shifts tenses or otherwise calls attention to itself in a distracting or superfluous manner. Occasionally [...]

In which The Gay Recluse documents the exceedingly beautiful ruins of Washington Heights.
Location: Audubon Terrace
Address: Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets
Remarks: Of all the exceedingly beautiful ruins in Washington Heights, perhaps none is more heartbreaking than Audubon Terrace. Not quite dead, it is like a great whale stranded on a beach; as much as we [...]

In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinion columns in The New York Times.
Bob Herbert/Investing in America
The Short Version: The country is falling apart. Let me tell you how, and with the same exact words I used last week!
In his words: “Will we wait until another New Orleans-style disaster occurs, or another heavily traveled bridge [...]

In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa).
Date of Incident: January 21, 2008
Time: 1:35am.
Causes of Disaster: Failure to implement long-term planning procedures; budget overruns; bureaucratic miscommunication.
Remarks: It was long ago noted that the tube in question was reaching dangerously low and unsustainable levels; procurement requests were [...]

Let’s imagine that your name is Rex Cole. You were born in 1887 in Port Huron, Michigan. You drop out of school at the age of 16 to become an electrician. Dissatisfied with the provincial life, you fight the tide of many millions and head east to New York City, where you save enough money [...]

It is not just the old architecture of Washington Heights that sends us spinning back in time to a period that was — if nothing else — more grand and spacious than what we see now. Take the corner of 163rd and St. Nicholas, just north of Amsterdam, which is one of the ugliest intersections [...]

On (and yes, it pains us to even write it) BoingBoing.net today — “A Directory of Wonderful Things” — we and presumably 60,000,000 (60 million) other subscribers were treated to a post about deep-fried things that ought not to be deep-fried. Featured was a photograph of a batter-encrusted iPod and headphones, and — if [...]

How do we even begin to describe our love for the music of Leonard Cohen, a man who was born with a shocking view of insanity’s chasm and somehow managed — at least most of the time — to keep one foot over it and to sing to us in a romantic whisper both childlike [...]

Statistics released today show a “trending down” in traffic among liberal blogs, while their right-wing counterparts appear to be enjoying a surge of growth. This should not surprise or disappoint liberal readers, any more than it should embolden conservative ones. The Gay Recluse is certainly a “liberal” blog to the extent that we abhor the [...]

In our daily travels, we are regularly confronted by some of our more clever but literal-minded critics with the question of why we would ever want to publish our thoughts and observations, if in fact it is our unending desire to be reclusive, or to obtain — in our own lexicon — a “community-free” existence. [...]

Each morning we turn the corner onto Broadway and are newly amazed by the cataclysmic arrangements of trash and debris on the streets and sidewalks. Plastic bags and dead leaves circle south in violent little eddies, while chicken bones, boxes, mannequin torsos and car batteries can be found heaped up on the curb. A barren, [...]

In yesterday’s Times, we were told that Italy has sunk to new depths of despair on many fronts, “struggling as few other countries do with fractured politics, uneven growth, organized crime and a tenuous sense of nationhood.” There is widespread malaise, or malessere. Quoted is Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome: “It’s a country that [...]

To the brave soul who trapped a mouse in a gluetrap and left it in the hallway, bravo! We would like to commend you for digging so deep and summoning the courage to carry such a ferocious beast — did you use your bare hands? — to the elevator, where we and countless others were [...]

When the russet hues of the setting sun stream through our western window, as happened today, it is quite possible to imagine Beatrice in the distorted, filtered light, contemplative and hovering as if she were still there, peering into the distance, longing for something to take her away. The first time we saw her, however, [...]

Stark and imperial, during the day the white travertine facade of the Metropolitan Opera seems as inviting as a walk across a desert, but at night glows like a beacon to the modern, urban spirit in which it was conceived. The cloud-like apparitions of Chagall’s paintings hypnotize us and soften the disdain of the high roman arches through which we pass [...]

We leave work and walk the long blocks from Madison to Sixth Avenue. We hurry down the stairs into the station, where we mindlessly extract our card from our wallet and slide it through the reader. In the distance we can sense the deep, subterranean rumble of what is surely an empty uptown D-train approaching [...]