Author Archives: Tin Man

Why I Can’t Stand Sam Sifton’s Writing

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I think it’s neat when you get to know a certain writer’s style so well that you can recognize that writer’s work without even looking at the byline.

It just happened to me. I just knew this piece about blackberry cobbler (can’t link to it directly; it’s piece #2) was written by Sam Sifton, and when I got to the bottom I realized I was right.

I know it’s not nice to say things like this, but: I can’t stand Sam Sifton’s writing. His prose is so fucking purple.

Apparently I’m not the first person to feel this way. And I found a Facebook group devoted to hating his writing.

I don’t read his restaurant reviews, but I do see his food column in the New York Times Magazine every few weeks. He’s been writing there for several months, and I’ve come to recognize a couple of his tics.

One, he uses the word “with” in an annoying precious way, usually (but not always) in the form [adjective] with [noun]:

He also likes the phrase “tastes of”:

I know it’s not nice to write to make fun of writers. But I can’t help it here. He just drives me batty.

20 Years Ago Today

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Twenty years ago today I moved into my first-year college dorm at UVa.

A couple of weeks ago it was my 20th anniversary of leaving Japan for good. From Japan, my family flew to Hawaii for a week, and then we flew home to the NYC area and lived in a company-provided apartment in midtown Manhattan for a week before driving down to UVa to move me into my dorm.

Things I remember happening during that last week before college — 20 years ago this past week:

(Also, my mom saw Jerry Orbach in the laundry room of the apartment building we were staying in.)

Wow, if I could have predicted how much would happen in the subsequent 20 years…

Earthquake

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So we had a little earthquake yesterday on the East Coast, eh?

Out in the New Jersey suburbs, toward the end of our lunch hour, a work friend and I had just sat down on a couple of stone benches on a patio next to our office building. He started bobbing his leg up and down, and then I started to feel my bench shaking. Well that’s weird, I thought. I asked him if he felt something shaking – he said no. So I figured our benches must have been resting on some loose tiles, and that’s why I could feel my bench shake while he was bobbing his leg up and down on his own bench. I felt another shake, but he was still bobbing his leg. So I didn’t think anything of it.

A couple of minutes later, a group of people started streaming out of the building. We thought maybe they were all planning to have a meeting out on the patio. Then one of them came up to us and said, “Did you guys feel any shaking out here?” I said that as a matter of fact, I had. He said they all felt the building shake and decided to come outside because it might have been an earthquake.

An earthquake! Of course, I immediately took out my phone and did a Twitter search for “earthquake.” People had felt it in New York! And in Washington! And in New England!

I had the same weird feeling I had during the 2003 blackout: slowly realizing that what you thought was a local phenomenon is being experienced by people across SEVERAL STATES.

I’m glad nobody was hurt, especially near the epicenter — which is not far from Charlottesville, my one-time home. Sounds like they felt it pretty hard at UVa, though.