Here's a list of Barney’s best insults. The list should probably be 10 times as long.

“You’re stupid.”

—to Margarey Egan of the Boston Herald, on some hundred occasions.

Short and sweet and sad.

The dog gave him a glance and we moved on by, but when I stopped after a decent distance and looked back he’d bent forward in his misery and I could hear sobs. A thin, tall man, perhaps in his late forties, his pale face now glistening with tears. Black jeans, gray shirt, some sort of jacket.

The New Yorker recently had a profile of Henry Luce and Time and Harold Ross and The New Yorker's opinion of them. Balloon Juice highlighted a couple of the good parts. This is the type of cattiness we could use a little more of.

[A] brutal parody of Timestyle, called “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce”: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.” He skewered the contents of Fortune (“branch banking, hogs, glassblowing, how to live in Chicago on $25,000 a year”) and of Life (“Russian peasants in the nude, the love life of the Black Widow spider”). He made Luce ridiculous (“ambitious, gimlet-eyed, Baby Tycoon Henry Robinson Luce”), not sparing his childhood (“Very unlike the novels of Pearl Buck were his early days”), his fabulous wealth (“Described too modestly by him to Newyorkereporter as ‘smallest apartment in River House,’ Luce duplex at 435 East 52nd Street contains 15 rooms, 5 baths, a lavatory”), or his self-regard: “Before some important body he makes now at least one speech a year.” He announced the net profits of Time Inc., purported to have calculated to five decimal places the “average weekly recompense for informing fellowman,” and took a swipe at Ingersoll, “former Fortuneditor, now general manager of all Timenterprises . . . salary: $30,000; income from stock: $40,000.” In sum, “Sitting pretty are the boys.”
...
“There’s not a single kind word about me in the whole Profile,” Luce said. “That’s what you get for being a baby tycoon,” Ross said. “Goddamn it, Ross, this whole goddamned piece is malicious, and you know it!” Ross paused. “You’ve put your finger on it, Luce. I believe in malice.”

I BELIEVE IN MALICE!

I knew following the New Yorker's Twitter account would eventually pay off. Today at New Yorker Fest, the latest news about the long rumored Arrested Development movie. Calling this project 'on again off again', is an insult to understatements. The news today? Not only is the movie on, AD creator want's to do a season of TV leading up to the movie. So... That's good.

Daniel Bejar is an artist with a project he calls Googlegänger. Daniel Bejar is also the name of a musician from Vancouver.

This is what Bejar did: He grew his hair into a frizzy mane, and he grew a beard, and then he set about re-creating some of the most widely circulated images of Bejar the musician, who has frizzy hair and a beard. Their faces aren’t identical—Bejar the artist has a more assertive brow and a narrower face—but the resemblance in the images is pretty close. He called his project “The Googlegänger,” and he put his work online. So far, at least two reviews of the new Destroyer album, “Kaputt,” have been accompanied by images of Bejar instead of Bejar.

Via kayfabe and Charlie Todd.

You've by now, no doubt, seen several people post about the Scientology article in The New Yorker. I just wanted it noted for the record that I read the whole damn thing.

I just looked through Longreads, and this article is by far the longest of the 119 New Yorker articles, clocking in at 100 minutes and 24,922 words. Most of the articles listed are around 20 minutes or 45 minutes. If there's a directory of really long New Yorker articles, I'd like to see it.

Daring Fireball recently linked to a New Yorker article about the interesting corporate structure of the Green Bay Packers. In it, this sentence:

Shareholders receive no dividend check and no free tickets to Lambeau Field. They don’t even get a foam cheesehead. All they get is a piece of paper that says they are part-owners of the Green Bay Packers.

"Huh", I thought, "Just like Apple." But then I found this:

People who own shares of of GBP stock cannot be sold to others--it can only be sold back to the team. The stock doesn't appreciate in value, no dividends are paid, and there are no season ticket privileges. However, the stock certificate is really cool, and you can proudly say you own part of a professional football team!

Chicago Christmas, 1984

There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.

Cool story, Gareth.

The New Yorker recently profiled The Spotted Pig chef April Bloomfield and among other things discussed what it takes to work for her:

If David Chang’s band of renegades are the Red Sox of the New York restaurant world, Bloomfield’s cooks are the Yankees, square and conscientious. When I asked her what kind of people she likes to hire, she replied, “Nobody weird. Nobody with dreadlocks.” She paused a minute, and added, “Well, no white guys with dreadlocks.” Her cooks wear black pants and black shoes. “People with chile peppers on their chef pants shouldn’t be allowed in the kitchen.”

I also thought this was interesting, about why a restaurant would want a farm. Status symbol.

They both want a farm, where they can grow vegetables and raise livestock for use in their restaurants. A farm is attractive for two reasons. The first is that Bloomfield can’t always procure the calibre of ingredients she wants, since many of the city’s top suppliers are beholden to more established chefs. “They get all funny,” Bloomfield said. “I’m not Daniel Boulud.” The second is that a farm, in the hyper-competitive New York restaurant world, is a sign of clout and longevity, the breadbasket of an empire. Bloomfield and Friedman have been looking at land in New Paltz and Wassaic.

Hendrik Hertzberg explains the Oscars' new voting system. The change, while making it more likely that blockbusters will be nominated, makes it more likely that an underdog will actually win.

From 1946 until last year, the voting worked the way Americans are most familiar with. Five pictures were nominated. If you were a member of the Academy, you put an “X” next to the name of your favorite. The picture with the most votes won. Nice and simple, though it did mean that a movie could win even if a solid majority of the eligible voters—in theory, as many as seventy-nine per cent of them—didn’t like it. Those legendary PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants don’t release the totals, but this or something like it has to have happened in the past, probably many times.

This year, the Best Picture list was expanded, partly to make sure that at least a couple of blockbusters would be on it… To forestall a victory for some cinematic George Wallace or Ross Perot, the Academy switched to a different system. Members—there are around fifty-eight hundred of them—are being asked to rank their choices from one to ten. In the unlikely event that a picture gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, the counting’s over. If not, the last-place finisher is dropped and its voters’ second choices are distributed among the movies still in the running. If there’s still no majority, the second-to-last-place finisher gets eliminated, and its voters’ second (or third) choices are counted. And so on, until one of the nominees goes over fifty per cent.

This scheme, known as preference voting or instant-runoff voting, doesn’t necessarily get you the movie (or the candidate) with the most committed supporters, but it does get you a winner that a majority can at least countenance. It favors consensus.

Via Balloon Juice