¶ Never having attended a bookstore event without buying something (usually a second copy of a book that we’ve read and liked), we’re pleased to read that McNally Jackson, our favorite downtown bookshop, is going to charge a fee for events in its new downstairs space. We loathe the idea of something for nothing (which is usually just another way of saying “advertising” — the horror!), and the thought that readers might sashay through a reading and then buy the book from Amazon makes our blood boil. ¶ Sam Sifton tries to make Desmond’s sound tired and boring, but even with the help of a few precious put-downs (“This is pensioner food for those who run pension funds”), he fails.We want to go.

¶ It would be uttermost hypocrisy if we tut-tutted the Times for giving ample space to two not unrelated stories today. ¶ The first is a rather incoherent — unavoidably incoherent, perhaps — account of an ABC stunt show, 101 Ways to Leave a Game Show. Watch one of the show’s YouTube clips after a selection from Candid Camera, and you will taste the bitterness of our national decline. I don’t think that the ordinary people in these shows are dumber than they used to be, but the producers are cynical and the audiences debased. Now, if they repackaged it as The Darwin Awards… ¶ The obituary of one Ryan Dunn, whom we’d never heard of, a “Jackass” who lost control of his Porsche 911 in the woods near his Pennsylvania home, killing a passenger as well as himself. Our first tyhought was that fiery automobile crashes are at least less sordid than drug overdoses, but of course this may have been a case of both.

¶ Today’s obituary of Joseph Miller (93) tells a good business story: inheriting a harness-making firm in the 1940s, Miller skirted obsolescence by marketing the high quality of his goods to equestrians, who by definition are people who don’t need horses. Good to know (or maybe not): Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti and Cuba patronized Miller’s for the outfitting of their cavalries. Question: is there a US Cavalry tucked away somewhere that we never hear about? A real one, that is.

¶ On the very off chance that you are an elementary-school pupil who might find yourself in Manhattan, be advised that aunts and uncles who offer to treat you to Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark either aren’t very bright or don’t think you’re very bright. Having pronounced the reconstituted show “a bore,” Ben Brantley compares it to its troubled predecessor thus:

So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show’s latest incarnation, I would have recommended “Spider-Man” only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved “Spider-Man.”

¶ Sam Sifton demotes Masa, the sushi temple at TimeWarner Center, from four stars to three. The food is extraordinary, but the overall experience, in the dining room at least, is not. (Perhaps Masa ought to abandon the pretense of a Western-style restaurant and just expand its bar.)

Bruised by recession, wizened by experience, gun-shy about the future, New York City now demands of its four-star restaurants an understanding that culture at its highest must never feel transactional, whatever its cost. We ascend to these heavens for total respite from the world below, for extraordinary service and luxuriant atmosphere as much as for the quality of the food prepared.

¶ There is nothing like “moral peril” to get Ross Douthat worked up — so worked up that his brain shuts down. His snarky eulogy-not of Dr Jack Kervorkian is a classic of slippery-slope shivers. While we would do anything to prevent rash and violent acts of self-destruction, we want to know what right anyone has to prevent the deliberate suicide of another.

¶ Two years ago, we had never heard of Hans Keilson, the German writer who has died in Nederland at the age of 101. As it is, we have read only one of his books, the surprisingly droll Comedy in a Minor Key, but we recommend it to everybody. The gentle good humor of Keilson’s sense of absurdity quickens our optimism about the future of the species.

¶ Front-page news: “Korean Grocers Are Dwindling.”. Few things could be more foreseeable, even if we hadn’t read Ben Ryder Howe’s My Korean Deli, in which a lawyer sets her mother up with a corner store so that she’ll have something to do. If that’s what running a Korean fruit stand has come to — but of course that’s exactly what they were supposed to come to. These operations, which required little background skill but endless attentiveness, were intended to serve as booster-stage engines that would rocket families out of poverty and into the American middle (or upper-middle!) class.

Instead of taking over the businesses when their parents retire, as some Italian- and Jewish-Americans did generations ago, the children of Koreans are finding work far from the checkout counter, in law firms, banks and hospitals. And parents insist on that, Mr. Lee said.

As success stories go, this one is slightly bittersweet; our beloved Green Village turned into a 7-11 years ago. Now, when is that goshdarned Fairway going to open up across the street?

¶ We thought that Huguette Clark was already dead, but, no, we had only known that she was probably not long for this world. A few months ago (?), the Times ran a story about the New Canaan estate that Ms Clark’s representatives had put on the market (for $24 million). That was the first that we’d heard of the reclusive heiress, who took her collection of dolls and dollhouses and checked into the hospital right down the street from us about a quarter of a century ago. (The hospital is no longer with us, either.) There is something so idle and unformed about the life that has come to an end after 104 years that one feels both protectively relieved that Ms Clark never heard the sound of tumbrils at her door — and also a tad disappointed.

¶ We’re not sure that Dwight Garner intended his review of Chester Brown’s Paying For It to be a rave, but we’ve lost no time ordering a copy. We feel a compare-and-contrast with Alison Bechdel coming up!  ¶ Playwright Yasmina Reza has a sound approach to interviews: “I try to structure interviews in such a way that I say nothing. It’s better for me to be mysterious.” Which is fine, because — and we really don’t mean to be snarky — her very entertaining plays are not.

¶ If we learned nothing else from William Doyle’s magisterial history of the French Revolution, we did grasp this: the Roman Catholic Church (as a pernicious secular organization) will die only from within. Efforts to kill it will only make it stronger. So we’re very pleased that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has fallen for the “Woodstock defense” as an explanation for priestly predations on pubertals. This amounts to blaming two sets of victims. Bravo!

¶ Sign of a slow news day: two tabloid-worthy tales on the front page of the Times. The arguably ewwier one is a  report by Timothy Williams on the countrywide thefts of human hair, which “perplexed” law enforcement officials. (You’ll be relieved to know that the hair in question is not attached to human scalps.) Mr Williams ventures, by way of explanation, the new respectability of hair extensions. ¶ More sordid, somehow, is Daniel Wakin’s pickup of an Irish Times exposé of bogus symphony orchestras touring the American heartland under the auspices of Columbia Artists Management, who would undoubtedly staff their class acts with roller derby queens if they thought they could get away with it. A tale of switcheroo immigration manifests in which the members of the Dublin Philharmonic are mostly Bulgarians. (Maybe they meant Lublin Philharmonic.) The Photoshopped image of the “Tschaikowsky St Petersburg State Orchestra” (which they’ve never heard of on the banks of the Neva) is particularly toasty.

¶ So long as the Republican Party is in the grip of plutocratic ideologues, we will never cast a vote for one of its candidates in a national election. In our defense of this arguably simplistic policy, we point to the Supreme Court, which has been reduced to Gilded Age dementia by the appointments of the three Bush administrations. Today’s editorial, “Gutting Class Action,” points to the latest in a long linie of judicial monstrosities. Nor is trhe evil confined to the Supreme Court. Not until 2040 at the earliest will the Federal Bench be purged of right-wing judges — and that’s of course assuming that wingnut-financed Republicans never hold the White House or Congress again.

¶ What with the piles of books that sprout in every room, we worry about hoarding. Our closets, cabinets, and even the refrigerator are stuffed almost to the point of disorganization. The worst thing about holding on to something because it might come in handy someday is that every now and then it actually does. But we have never given much thought to the children of hoarders, who, it turns out, have some not very surprising tics, such as a disinclination to give parties. The impulse to hoard can lead its victims to choose their clutter over their children. Yikes!

¶ Doreen Carvajal ends a bittersweet story about the chuetas of Majorca — Jewish families that pretended to be Christian in response to the Inquisition (which burned three of them alive in 1691) but that didn’t fool the neighbors, who taught their children a taunting rhyme containing fifteen surnames, including that of (did you know?) Joan Miró — with the rather ouchmaking news that 78-year old Bernat Pomar has recently undergone conversion to Judaism, if you know what we mean by that.