Shea Stadium, a futuristic perfect circle ballpark cast in concrete over the ash piles of Flushing Meadows, Queens, has now gone dark forever. It will be replaced by CitiField, right next door. As a lifelong Mets fan and neighbor of Shea Stadium, I am upset to see the great building go and I don’t like the corporate label on the new ballpark. But at the same time, I’m grateful the Mets will remain in Flushing Meadows …

The article that should have been on the cover of this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, Roger Lowenstein’s review of James K. Galbraith’s The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, is an attempted takedown of the son of famed liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Apparently written just before the latest Wall Street and Main Street financial horrors were revealed (the NYTBR is always printed over a week in advance, and articles are submitted by writers …

I’m coming at today’s post from a slightly off-topic direction, mainly because I’m thinking about inspiration and discipline and the idea comes from an off-topic place. I hope you can forgive me.

For a few years now, I have been a photographic hobbyist. I have no aspirations to be anything other than a hobbyist and though I’ve sold a few prints here & there, photography is not something for which I would ever quit my day job. I am fascinated by the craft of photography and …

1. Bob Dylan’s poetry in the New Yorker? Bud Parr says the poems aren’t particularly good, but I like the way Dylan’s going back to that old enigmatic folksinger/hick voice he once used on his liner note poems for early albums like The Times They Are A-Changin’. Stuff like this:

i ran out t the phone booth
made a call t my wife. she wasnt home.
i panicked. i called up my best friend
but the line was busy
then i went t …

I love watching people read when I take the subway to work every morning. It gives me hope for the future.

You see a wide variety of reading materials on the R train. Many languages, many formats, cheap novels, literary novels, lots of bibles and other religious literature, history books, tabloid reports of the day’s tidings. Everybody is engrossed.

As near as I could tell, this guy was reading a C# software development guide.

These guys, …

What do corporate book publishers like Random House, Simon and Schuster and Farrar Straus and Giroux have in common with financial powerhouses like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG? If you guessed that they are all doomed, you’re wrong.

Here’s the right answer: the book industry, like the financial industry, should be in much better shape than it is. Wall Street is suffering from the consequences of short-sighted management and greedy, over-optimistic expectations, despite the fact that the borrowers these banks finance remain …

David Gates on Philip Roth’s new Indignation, on the cover of this weekend’s New York Times Book Review:

How does Roth get away with this stuff? The cliffhanger, the obscure portent, the withholding of essential information? He doesn’t use these antiquated devices ironically.

Well, that’s what I’ve been saying. He doesn’t get away with it.

In my opinion, Philip Roth is the Oliver Stone of fiction. We are drawn to him because he creates strong characters and has a knack for plots and situations that …

So, what’s in your reading queue?

Slavoj Zizek, a furry and fiery “rockstar philosopher” from Slovenia who calls himself a Communist and rages at the hypocrisy of wealthy American liberals, appeared in a raucous debate at the New York Public Library last night. Zizek’s opposite partner was French activist and intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, who typically argues for idealistic solutions and pragmatic steps towards a more peaceful world.

Bernard-Henri Levy can usually command a stage by himself (he made a strong impression on me earlier this year in a

Like many software developers in New York City, I’ve done my time in the financial district. I was working on the 17th floor of the JP Morgan bank on 60 Wall (the building is now occupied by Deutsche Bank) when I started LitKicks, and I often used to write about life on Wall Street in those days. Since then I’ve left downtown Manhattan to develop websites for magazine publishers, record companies, television networks and litigation consultants, yet somehow these …