What could be a hotter date than going to see Werner Herzog give a talk? The only thing that would make it sexier is if someone shot him and he pulled down his pants.

Is there no escape?

No.

Doooomed. Doomed I tellya.

I don't trust people who aren't already filled with self-loathing. The problem isn't that a Style section series might fill you with contempt for yourself; the problem is that you need the Style section series to get you there.

1: Herzog is teh hero. That was awesome.

I've always identified very deeply with the old (Groucho Marx?) joke, "I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have me."

Is it really that surprising that this place has people who enjoy lectures?

And, for the record, 10:00 pm is a perfectly legitimate time to go to bed!

10pm, you're a wild man! I stagger from my kids bedtime song to my own bed around 8:30.

But of course there's nothing wrong with going to lectures or meeting people at geeky little events. The problem is just being self-important twerps about it. You can loathe the individuals mentioned in the Style section, and more importantly the writers for the Style section, without loathing the subject matter depicted.

(And SCMT is my kind of guy.)

I remember when time magazine came out with a "heroin chic" cover in like 96. I was like, fuck, now I really have to quit, because the shit is getting beyond played out when time magazine notices. husband-to-be x bought me a copy, figuring I'd see the light.

No, no, the people in this article aren't your people, because they are reclaiming a "body part that has lost ground in recent years to biceps and pecs." One assumes that among your friends, intelligence never lost currency.

More importantly, one assumes your biceps and pecs never gained currency.

Ugh, this article would be a lot more interesting without the "dating" angle. I had no idea "Intelligence Squared" was a series of public debates, I just thought it was an NPR show. The greatly decreased age of people at library lectures is interesting too.

"Let's face it, there really is nothing more sensual than caressing someone's mind," said Paul Holdengräber ..."

Except caressing someone's mind and then eating it, of course.

Genuinely smart people can say interesting things even about stupid shit. Nut up, posers: www.blogger.com.

13: . . . and then making an uncomfortable joke about one's personal familiarity with the clap.

14: How would you know?

Oh, Ogged knows.

"Genuinely smart people can say interesting things even about stupid shit."

Genuinely smart people can say stupid shit even about interesting things.

18: Let's leave Jane Galt out of this.

12: This, precisely. Whatever story there is in this piece, the dating angle is a style-section contrivance.

a cranial lucha libre where, on one night, author Michael Crichton sparred with other panelists on global warming. For the right set, it can be quite the aphrodisiac

The bullshit factor is off the charts.

You mean intellidating has nothing to do with playing Sea Battle on Intellivision? Well, I'm hosed.

some of my friends have gone to the exact events they describe

That can be troubling, sure, but you don't really have to get concerned until you realize your friends are going to Sindergarten.

2: Captain Howdy is that you?

It would be so creepy to peek in the window of one of the busses in 23, in the middle of a dark alley.

22 is kind of hilarious.

22 is kind of creepy. I'm all for drugs, but the mass-regression set in the abandoned school bus at night smacks of Grade B Horror Film Set.

"hilarious" and "creepy" are not mutually distinctive -- indeed there is lots of room for overlap.

Dalton school should ring a bell. Sausegely should be questioned about this.

#26. Sindergarten sounds so much like an episode of Law & Order that I'm certain Dick Wolf had a hand in inventing it.

to 29: populuxe, you are a thousand percent right.

30: As he was in 13. I was going to suggest pushing long needles in but eating is better.

In New York, even spelling bee nights have popped up as a romantic twist for the chic, unmarried and grammatically gifted.

I think there might be a problem here.

29: It would also make a great CSI: New York episode.

32 - I think there was a Veiled Conceits addressing that very problem. But it looks like that site has dropped off the blogroll.

Now that everything that needs to be said about it probably already has, I gave it a thread of its own.

Oh, heebie, I think you're talking about a real social problem, I'm talking about the article author's confusion about the connection between spelling and grammar.

SCMT's you need the Style section prompts this . Who are the various "Style" sections for? Are they for stroking the people mentioned in them? Are they guides for the clueless? Are they just another arm of the advertising department? Who really does need them? I read them to get my MDR of humans = silly but is there another use?

Advertising to the aspirational clueless. Buck has an old friend who, although in many ways a lovely guy, is New York Magazine man. If there's a list of the 10 best anything in NY, pizza places to dermatologists, he had an opinion on four of the ten listed before the magazine came out. Goes to trendy restaurants, wears trendy clothes -- if you wanted to be an affluent trendy NY guy, you'd want to imitate this guy. The Style section, and New York Magazine, are instruction manuals for people who want to be trendy and need to know what to do to keep up: if you buy the advertised products and do the things that get discussed, you'll be on the cutting edge of fashionability.

It's all bullshit, but that's the message.

37: They're a spin-off of the Living section intended to attract readers from a high-disposable-income demographic and the advertisers who love them.

Pwned.

#37. In her biography of Basquiat, Phoebe Hoban remarks on--I think--Mary Boone's triumph at getting Basquiat on the cover of NYT Magazine. Then Boone--who represented the artist--used just that piece to help sell her clients on the artist the NYT was raving over. So, yeah, all of the above.

#31. 'Cause everything fried in oil = TEH YUM.

May I just say that I get the NYT Sundays only, read the wedding announcements first, and if I see someone I know (which happens maybe 3 times a year, less frequently in my early thirties than it was in my late twenties), I know I will have a good week.

Yay Sunday Styles!

12: "The greatly decreased age of people at library lectures is interesting too."

Seconded, I noticed that paragraph myself, and thought, "this has much better sourcing than most trend/style pieces." Not that I checked the source of that statistic, but if true, it probably means this is a genuine trend for once.

My thought about the article as a whole was that it presented yet another reason for me to move the fuck out of my current town, which is a nice place in some ways, but is way too small to support stuff like what this article about. The comments on the previous Style section post here (serial rapist fashion designer) was a tiny bit depressing to me with all the talk about various social life permutations I'm apparently missing out on. Sometimes it just seems to me like the "21-30 and single" demographic is numbered in the single digits in this town.

43: Fashion designer - NY Times; lectures & stuff - Washington Post. Different towns, different style sections. Doesn't change that 13 is right, but Style editors don't print enough zombie stories. Seems they ate too many ad reps to really be considered a desirable demographic. Either that or their demo was too graphic.