That sounds sort of, kind of, maybe just a little bit like Margot at the Wedding, in which Hinds plays a fiction writer of an ill-defined sort. I don't remember him being bald, but there was definitely a redhead involved, and "set in 1970's-1990's New York (I think)" perfectly describes Noah Baumbach's hazy brand of nostalgia, if nothing else.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 3:31 PM on August 12, 2008

It's got to be The World of Apu, by Satyajit Ray.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 1:55 PM on July 22, 2008 marked best answer

Marc Maron, author of The Jerusalem Syndrome. You appear to be remembering the October 12, 2000 show (available on his web site, once you figure out that you need to disable your pop-up blocker).
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 8:47 AM on July 15, 2008 marked best answer

In case you're still having problems watching the video:

"What's the point of that, watching the Olympics? How does that make anyone feel good, especially someone like me? You know, I watched for like three minutes, I'm like, okay, great, you're the fastest swimmer... Yeah, it's like, oh boy, he's the guy that jumps over the thing with the pole the best. Whoooo! You know, it's like, good luck with that. You know, I don't come from that, I've never been an athletic... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 9:28 AM on July 15, 2008

This appears to be pretty doable for most three-letter words, although it gets a hell of a lot harder at four letters. I say if you're going to do a sestina, which is a half-insane festival of compositional masochism to begin with, you might as well go whole hog and impose a theme on yourself:

cat (caterwaul, catechism, catsup, catastrophe, category)
ant (antechamber, antipathy, antlers, antique, antsy)
dog (dogooder, doggerel, dogged, dogma,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 1:54 PM on June 11, 2008 marked best answer

I think aught and Kattullus have come closest to what you're looking for. Erickson, Wright, and Bolano are great suggestions (as are Gombrowicz, Cortazar, Calvino, Pynchon, Dick, Wallace, Danielewski, and Mitchell).

Other contemporary possibilities in this vein: Victor Pelevin, DBC Pierre, Alasdair Gray, Gary Shteyngart, Jeanette Winterson, Orhan Pamuk, Genichiro Takahashi, James Kelman, some of J.M. Coetzee. These aren't necessarily my favorites, but they do, in my... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 10:58 AM on May 24, 2008

"Rent a tiny battery-powered blimp and set it hovering next to the sink. Program the blimp to display the message GOOGLE CLEAN DISHES."
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 10:52 AM on May 7, 2008

If you need this specific article for a specific, genuine reason (beyond "someone please summarize Between the Acts for me so I can finish my homework"), I'd suggest using the site's contact form to write to the editors and politely ask if they can give it to you. They give free subscriptions to institutions in countries with per-capita income below the world average, and while you're not an institution, and while Chile seems to not quite qualify by that measure, I... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 1:23 PM on May 5, 2008 marked best answer

Merzbow?
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 3:01 PM on April 18, 2008

Anything by the great Tim Parks, but especially his memoirs about life in Italy (Italian Neighbors and An Italian Education), which will give you a keen, nuanced, entertaining sense of what it's like to be an English-speaking expatriate adjusting to the country and its culture. He's mostly lived in Verona, but that's close enough that I doubt the distinctions from Tuscany much matter for your purposes.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 7:41 PM on March 19, 2008

While copying the picks of any one yapping expert is a recipe for disaster - they all have blind spots, and irrational loyalties, and professional incentives to pick unlikely upsets that'll be immediately forgotten if they're wrong and parlayed into higher-payed yapping jobs if they're right - copying the consensus picks of a bunch of yapping experts (I mean, like, dozens) gives you a sort-of instant meta-expertise. If seventy per cent of the yappers on the major sports sites are picking a 12... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 6:05 PM on March 19, 2008

Where's the great evangelical novel? The great Shaker novel? The great Muslim-American novel? The literary novel can be many disparate things, but its history is largely secular, its characteristic dispositions skepticism, ambivalence, ambiguity, and doubt. I'd think we'd need to see a long and healthy period of cultural Mormonism, distinct from religious Mormonism, before we could expect from it a flowering of what's essentially an irreligious art.

Persecution, on the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 2:33 PM on February 7, 2008

Pretty much anything by Fassbinder.

Katzelmacher - 9 days
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant - 10 days
The Merchant of Four Seasons - 12 days
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul - 15 days

Dang.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 2:59 PM on January 7, 2008

Going to amazon.fr > Livres > Littérature > Littérature américaine brings up a list of American literature sorted by "Meilleures ventes" (best-selling). Aside from the no-names unaccountably popular in translation - who is Douglas Kennedy and how did he conquer France? - the list seems to be along the lines of what you're looking for. Catcher in the Rye (L'Attrape-Coeurs) is the fifth result; Gatsby le magnifique is number twenty.

The shipping is a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 10:57 AM on December 4, 2007 marked best answer

Snooty highbrow appreciation of The Illusionist, including a quote from the director suggesting that the twist can be read as part of the Inspector's deductive fantasia.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 2:38 PM on November 20, 2007

The worst hostel you can imagine - some dungeonlike basement with an inch of water on the floor and strange squeaky scuttlings in the walls and Polish guys in tracksuits sitting around all day smoking weird brown-tipped Russian cigarettes and unsubtly hinting at not-quite-legitimate sources of income - will still be brimming with people your age with exotic accents and outlandish travel stories who want nothing more than to make another eleven new best friends. You'll clamber up to the Alhambra... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 2:38 PM on November 18, 2007

Gould is very good - and you'd certainly be able to piece together an overview of evolutionary theory from his work - but he's definitely a particpant and a partisan, trying to steer the field in a certain direction. "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" is an argumentative title, not a descriptive one. Plus that thing is frickin' long.

I'd suggest What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 8:52 AM on November 14, 2007

True, but the same could be said of Dawkins, or Mayr, or anyone else authoritative enough in their field to write a book that doesn't dumb things down for the masses. All the more reason to read as many different authors as possible.

I just sprained something in my neck nodding in spastic agreement with all of this. My point was really only that Gould, of all the usual suspects, is least inclined to provide a straight-up comprehensive overview. He's... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 9:54 AM on November 14, 2007

I am not young enough
to know everything.

[Wilde]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 11:36 AM on November 12, 2007

You will, by allowing yourself to be annoyed by passing aromas, tasteless ring tones, loud phone voices, talk radio, ugly sweaters, cretinous political opinions, weird and reverberating laughs, ill-timed sneezing, enthusiastic sports fandom, the things that people do with their jaws and knuckles, chewing, e-mail forwards, Christianity, insincerity, and unwavering cheerfulness, slowly drive yourself insane and make yourself unsuitable for employment anywhere less secluded than a hut in the Yukon.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 6:19 PM on November 9, 2007 marked best answer

Citizen Kane.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 4:46 PM on November 8, 2007

Also: Zhang Yimou's Hero, with its abrupt and obnoxious encomium on the virtues of authoritarianism. Jet Li gets to kick ass for 98 minutes then eat shit for one; he stands in quite handily for the audience that way.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 5:15 PM on November 8, 2007

Its modern iconographic use might be traced back to this, although I wouldn't be surprised by older European heraldic or classical origins in addition.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 11:03 AM on November 8, 2007

pokermonk, I really do suspect that this wacky Teutonic version of Risk is responsible, at least in part, for the standardization of red and blue as the colors generically indicating opposing military forces. The game itself (or variants of it) seems to have been used for military training by a large number of armies well into the twentieth century, and you can see how those color conventions might linger in contemporary maps representing merely political factions.

You... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 3:20 PM on November 8, 2007 marked best answer

It appears to be Bembo Schoolbook.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 7:29 PM on October 18, 2007 marked best answer

I don't remember having seen it used in a novel before, and it is oddly successful at capturing a certain mood at loose in the book - although I read it a little differently from you. It seemed to me, with all its earnest roundnesses and fussy serifs, to be somewhat awkwardly caught between the natural and the artificial, like a machine trying to write like a human, or a child like an adult.

Interesting the work good design can almost invisibly do.
posted to Ask Metafilter by dyoneo at 8:05 PM on October 18, 2007