Nobody was clamoring for a new formula — “I’ve never been as confident about a decision as I am about the one we’re announcing today.” That’s what David Keough, the president of Coca-Cola, said on April 23, 1985, which was the day the company held a press conference at New York City’s Lincoln Center to announce the introduction…

Guess which spelling drives me nuts — It’s generally the case that punctuation rules tend to be applied across the board. Here’s a common rule: “Start a sentence with a capital letter.” Everyone knows this rule. There is no controversy involved when beginning a sentence with a capital letter — unless you’re bell hooks, which only goes…

It’s just that, unlike religious beliefs, they’re rational — “Evolution is just a theory!” How many times have I seen that said on Twitter? A lot. The irony of the assertion has to do with the writer not realizing that theory has two meanings: in the everyday world of average people where the colloquial use of the word means…

I’m referring to what characters in movies and television shows don’t see but should — It’s long been accepted by audiences that movies and TV shows will take the occasional liberty with reality. From our perspective, as viewers, this is called the willing suspension of disbelief. A fistfight? We see two guys slug each other for minutes when in real life one well-landed punch to…

I never let on that I knew who she was — I saw this question posed at Quora: “Have you ever been at an event and found yourself sitting next to someone famous?” My response: It was in the early 1990s and I was sitting by myself in a Broadway theater waiting for a play to begin, minding my own business…

There are three options. I have a favorite —

Let’s kill this terrible idea once and for all — [September 5, 2023. I wrote this essay a couple of years ago, but I recently had a back-and-forth with a guy on Formerly Twitter who said I was wrong. My interlocutor got me thinking about some things that maybe I ought to have included in my piece from 2021. …

Three years ago, I sent a letter to the manager of a well-known actress about a screenplay I had co-written. I dispensed with any "To whom it may concern" BS because that kind of formal tone will get you nowhere. My letter? It was funny. And so the manager called…

And a pitch for a limited series — About twenty years ago I worked at a small hedge fund. One of my coworkers was rail thin and constantly eating. No three meals a day for this guy. He was eating something — yogurt, a banana, nuts, a protein bar — at least every two hours throughout the day…