Scott Rosenberg’s excellent defense of links begins by shredding the silly studies that purport to show that link cause brain damage. (If you meet someone who tells you that links impose cognitive overhead, keep an eye on your wallet.)

In part 2, Rosenberg does a nice job of explaining SEO-driven “corporate” linking, the sort of idiocy that newspaper and magazine sites indulge in order to grab more page views and cram more ads and Google juice into every inch.

It’s possible for links to make meaning and money at the same time; one doesn’t have to exclude the other. But when driven by the prospect of profit, bad links can begin to swamp good ones

ART actor Will Lebow has published (at last!) the privately-circulated open letter that launched the current ART Dustup.

Shakespeare serves the The Donkey Show as an effective marketing tool, but the process is not adaptation. It is not reinvention. It is, simply and precisely, exploitation.  The resulting shows were popular, fun, and in one case visually stunning, but they contained none of the power, intellect, and beauty of Shakespeare. They didn’t need to. That’s not how they seek to impact the audience.

I made a couple of Aviation Cocktails last night.

An Aviation is composed of gin, lemon juice, and maraschino liqueur. (Replace the marsachino with triple sec and you’ve got a white lady. Then replace the gin with tequila and the lemon with lime and you’ve got a margarita.) It’s also supposed to have crème de violette, but I don’t have any crème de violette and neither do you.

I came across a prolonged discussion the the Aviation on eGullet. I’d never heard of an Aviation before. Turns out it’s pretty tasty and interesting, and you’ve got to admit that the name is salty as hell.

Get the book.

Alexia Tarabotti is a Victorian spinster who labors under the weight of misfortune. Admittedly, her father is rich, and her mother, if no longer precisely good-looking, is at any rate fashionable and received in all the best houses. But Alexia is afflicted with a dusky complexion, an unruly spirit, two simpering half-sisters, a perception that she is unmarriageable, and a complete absence of soul. In consequence, the vampires and werewolves who populate the cream of London society are rendered temporarily human at her touch.

Inevitably, hilarity and marriage ensue. We visit the headquarters of London’s vampires in Westminster, and meet a Scottish Lord who happens to be (a) a werewolf and (b) the head of Her Majesty’s Bureau of Unnatural Registry. Centuries ago, the British reached an accommodation with their supernaturals, and the alliance of human and superhuman subjects has carried the British flag across the globe. In the end (of course) we also meet a scientific mastermind whose nefariously subterranean laboratories can only be reached through a tiny ascension room. Alexia inhabits a good, clean, and frothy world that is neither very deep nor very disturbing, and in place of overwrought angst we have good and (mostly) clean fun.

A silver lining to the dark cloud of the Boston Globe’s decline to provincial status is that the new Globe can give lots of play to local stories. This Sunday, the Globe’s big page one story described cataclysms shaking the American Repertory Theater. (I’ve been an ART subscriber through most of its history.)

As Paulus heads into her second season at ART, she has largely replaced the company’s steady diet of serious avant-garde productions with audience-pleasing musicals and adventurous interactive experiences. She has been a commercial smash, while shedding actors — and longtime staffers — who defined the company for decades.

Now, she’s facing the ultimate byproduct of success, a backlash. To her supporters, Paulus is a crowd-inspiring theater revolutionary. To her detractors, she is the Broadway-obsessed, box-office-driven director who has dismantled a prized institution.

The piece, by Geoff Edgers, focuses on what appears to be a greater rift than the inevitable change that must accompany the appointment of a new artistic director. Actors, staffers, and long-time supporters are quietly furious.

One issue, clearly, is whether the American Repertory will be a repertory company. This, after all, was always the vision: a core group of actors who you’d see in many productions over a span of years. Watching familiar actors grow over time and handle unexpected challenges was often terrific, though inevitably some actors were cast in parts for which they weren’t ideal and others kept turning up in the same sort of part in every production.

Paulus didn’t use the resident company much in her first year; I assumed that might be transitional, but apparently it’s policy. That’s a loss.

The Globe story casts the change as a conflict between ART’s experimental tradition and Paulus’s desire to use more accessible material in order to reach new audiences. I think that’s the wrong frame. Sleep No More was one of the most experimental productions the ART has staged, and also one of the most memorable. The Globe story alludes to its sexiness, but that’s just old Boston prudery: the nudity in Sleep No More wouldn’t evoke comment in London or New York.

But I sense that the ART thinks its great success last year was The Donkey Show, a disco nightclub in which something like Midsummer Night’s Dream happens. I thought The Donkey Show was an intriguing failure, the sort of thing that you’d think was inspired if you accidentally wandered into it one night in Maastricht or Manchester, but that doesn’t function as the premiere production of the New Artistic Director. The real problem in my view, though, is they’re still doing it a year later, and seem intent on doing it forever. That’s not what Harvard’s theater should be doing; that’s dinner theater.

And repeated The Donkey Show shows no confidence in the concept itself; if you want to do drama in a nightclub, how about giving Tempest a try? Pal Joey? How about Antigone? The dramatic point of Donkey is to have drama happen just at the edge of your field of vision while other stuff is happening all around you. That should work for other stories. And if it can only work with Midsummer and that sells tickets, well, take it to North Shore or Charles or somewhere and be a nightclub and let the Cambridge theater space go back to doing theater.

For the rest of the first season, Gatz was brilliant, Paradise Lost was solid, Johnny Baseball was pleasant froth that needed a better book, and Best of Both Worlds didn’t gel. That’s not bad – for a transitional season. And in any case, if the ART is to be a repertory company, some change is inevitable; actors who came with ART to Cambridge with a 27-year-old Cherry Jones (in Midsummer) in 1980 are 30 years older today. But if ART is not a repertory company, what is it going to be?

That said, the Globe story uses Amanda Palmer as a symbol for popularity and accessibility. That’s wrong — especially before anyone has seen the new Cabaret. Sure, it might be lousy. But I think there’s a gritty play in Cabaret that could be liberated from our memory of Liza, and Palmer might be the one to do it.

Get the book.

Dornenburg and Page use a distinctive style in their books about cooking and restaurant life, threading together numerous interviews about aspects of the art of cooking. At its best, this provides a consensus of successful cooks in their own words. At times, though, this book (like previous Dornenburg and Page ventures on chef training and restaurant reviewing) can read like Zagat’s, stringing together many short excerpts to construct an artificial consensus.

The core contribution of this book is a vast table of foods that go together, including both classic and modern combinations. Also of great interest are a list of parallel menus developed by prominent chefs of the 80’s and 90’s – comparing, say, the opening menu of Chez Panisse to what they’re doing today.

Why do some foods “go together”? Are these preferences purely memory and convention? Surely, contingency plays a big role in what we consider comfort food and in what we think delicious: Proust’s madeleines might have been donuts had he lived in San Francisco, though his time would still have been lost. Occasionally, you get a chemical incompatibility between two ingredients — asparagus is good and wine is good, you could imagine nice combinations, but the wine reacts with an enzyme in asparagus and so it’s not gonna work out. People form habits: some people always drink scotch, others drink vodka.

But I think there’s much more to be said on the subject. One suggestion here is that it’s nice to have ingredients that naturally get along: birds love grapes, for example, and poultry goes nicely with grape preparations and wine-rich sauces. Escoffier liked visual fantasies in this genre and things can easily get out of hand, but you can see why the affinity can make sense. Grant Achatz made an interesting observation about constructing tasting menus, finding that if people enjoy feasts more if they move from savory to sweet and then return to savory before dessert.

The title is perhaps unfortunate because Ruhlman’s Making of a Chef trilogy, the first volume of which appeared the following year, is deeply engaged in the question of whether cooking is an art, where Dornenburg and Page are chiefly using “art” to stand for a consensus view of excellence. Their approach, depending as it does on the joint opinions of a spectrum of prominent cooks, cannot easily explore the question because every respondent considers their cooking to be good, each has their own definition of art, and most of them are far too busy running a demanding business to spend a great deal of time investigating the natures of art, craft, commerce, and pleasure. I wonder, too, whether it might make sense to talk to critics and to people who eat well. In place of the abstract joys of that philosophical inquiry, however, we here have dozens of pages charting the best flavors for that lovely trout you caught, or what you might do with that bag of very ripe heirloom tomatoes that really need to be cooked tonight.

Why is one called on the carpet? And where would that carpet be?

Update: It’s the carpet in the headmaster’s office. Of course. (Or perhaps the boss’s office?)

One of the things that makes Echo Bazaar work is that it is under-written. The setting is baroque: London has literally fallen into the Abyss, Hell has an embassy in Marylebone Road, and the game greets you as its “delicious friend”. But the writing is, for the most part, clean and spare, simply stating (for example) that you’ve successfully picked the rat-catcher’s pocket for a tasty string of six rats.

One recurring bit of business is the starveling cat, who always appears in doggerel.

“Starveling” once might be a bit much, but recurrence makes it work. (There must be a dozen versions of this starveling cat, and you can buy starveling cat t shirts.)

So many games are so overwritten or just incoherent that their writing is obviously window dressing. “Someone set us up the bomb!” “It’s made of yew, and nearly new!” In games that repeat the same words time and again, simplicity and word choice can take you far.

We were in Chicago to visit Mom, who isn’t very well. We’d had an early dinner.

Egullet had recently featured a terrific thread about a three-day whirlwind tour of every wonderful thing to eat in Chicago that the writer (obviously a cooking pro) could humanly squeeze into a long weekend. One of his stops was Mado, the nifty farm-conscious joint where we’d just had some lovely eggs in purgatory. His next stop had been The Violet Hour, the night was young, and it was about to pour.

There is a point where the marriage of gin and vermouth is consummated. It varies a little with the constituents, but for a gin of 95 proof and a harmonious vermouth it may be generalized as about 3.7 to one. And that is not only the proper proportion but the critical one; if you use less gin it is a marriage in name only and the name is not martini. You get a drinkable and even pleasurable result, but not art’s sunburst of imagined delight becoming real. Happily, the upper limit is not so fixed; you may make it four to one or a little more than that, which is a comfort if you cannot do fractions in your head and an assurance when you must use an unfamiliar gin. But not much more. This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow again and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen magically along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn. But it would not be a martini if we should see him. – Bernard DeVoto, The Hour

The Violet Hour has no sign. You find it from the address, and perhaps from the young women in aspirational strappy dresses waiting outside. It has a wait. It has rules: no Bud, no Gray Goose, no Jäger bombs, no bombs of any kind, and don’t bring anyone you wouldn’t bring home to your mother for Sunday dinner.

It’s great.

I had a Summer Sidecar (Maison Surrenne, Lemon, Orange Curacao, Lillet, Orange Flower Water ) and a Blue Ridge Manhattan (Rittenhouse Rye, Carpano Antica, Laphroig, Peach Bitters). Linda had an El Diablo (Lunazul Blanco, Lime, Ginger Syrup, Créme de Cassis) and the famous Juliet and Romeo (Beefeater, Mint, Cucumber, Rose Water). The place is serious – home-made bitters, eight kinds of ice, and when making that Juliet and Romeo the bartender brought over a bunch of fresh mint and placed it before Linda before selecting the leaves. You could smell the fresh mint.

Besides, you just have to love that unicorn.

Dirda adores Davidson, and this new collection is a nice supplement to the Davidson Treasury. Some of the wonderful literary confections like “Traveller from an Antique Land” depend on your knowing a lot of Victorian literary biography but they’re fun anyway. “The Peninsula” has a lovely sense of American business history and its resonance for families. “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” is a wonderfully compact meditation on the terrible contingencies and chances of history.

Paul Graham can write:

By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"

Almost a dozen years ago, I wrote a short piece about Web pages that outlive their creators.

The emergence of Web shrines -- home pages dedicated to the memory of friends or ancestors -- is unexpected, unheralded, and remarkable. Web shrines are among the clearest signs that the Web is neither purely a commercial nor a transitory phenomenon.

Of course, Web memorials no longer strike us as unexpected or especially remarkable. And I think we now see customs of behavior regarding the Facebook pages or weblogs of those who are no longer with us.

I think we’re missing two conventions, though. We need a symbol, a stone, to say, “this a a memory.”

And we need as well a mechanism for leaving little stones as we pass by, a way of showing respect and sympathy and acknowledging the visit.

A cooking diary by Sharon Hwang. Lovely interactive HTML design (once you go ahead and start clicking and dragging stuff). Only yesterday, you had to do this stuff in Flash.

Update: FoodFolio is a web service recipe organizer. Personally, I think recipes are overrated, and of course there’s Tinderbox. But if you want your recipes in the cloud, this’ll do it.

Dave Winer suggests that book reviews like the New York Times are using the wrong business model. Instead of selling ads, he proposes, they should sell books and take a cut of each book they sell.

In lots of ways, this makes sense. Indeed, I always thought one of the shortcomings of the late Drood Review of Mystery was that you’d read about a book but couldn’t immediately order it. Nowadays, of course, we have Amazon and Alibris, but this used to be a real obstacle.

Winer’s model, unfortunately replaces one perverse incentive with a new one. Today, newspaper reviews are overly dramatic because dramatic reviews sell papers. A really devastating review is memorable, and a review that promises that a book, movie, or restaurant is the best thing ever attempted is bound to get attention. It’s a respectable version of trolling: extreme views flourish while sound judgment languishes. But Winer’s model could easily replace that incentive with one that seeks chiefly to move product, and to review whatever titles are most likely to get great box office. Instead of over-reacting to important books, we might get even more rose-tinted assessments of best-selling serial sequels.

Get the book.

“Don’t doctor recipes. More is less, and sugar will only get you so far.” –Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector

We all know that “shortbread” is short because the shortening in the dough interrupts or shortens the web of gluten that makes bread dough doughy. We know about glutenin webs, but how did the medieval cook know about this?

Mark Anderson has rendered the Lapham’s Quarterly diagram of relationships among Romantic and Modern writers, actors, painters, and muses in Tinderbox. You can download your copy here.

The keepers of the $47,870 directory think I’m a crank for expressing some doubt that crowdsourcing is the best way to conduct literary criticism or to organize a reference library. Isn’t public tagging obviously democratic and full of open-source virtue?

We now learn that Digg has been systematically distorted for years by a cadre of Republicans who worked together to inflate the scores of wingnut sites and who tried to bury everything that did not further their agenda.

But of course literature is free from factions, movements, and personal animosities.

Thanks to Mary Kim Arnold for the chart link!