The mix this week is more culture than tech. Most of the podcasts I sample were off for the holidays, or they had recorded episodes in advance, so I went a little farther afield. [See all lists.]

The Dinner Party Download, Episode 12 "The show that helps you win your next dinner party." A breezy podcast from Brendan Newnam and Rico Gagliano of 89.33 KPC public radio in Los Angeles. It starts with an icebreaker joke: "A penguin walks into a bar..." On to small talk, based on news tips from American Public Media reporters: How big of a wallet would you need to carry all the cash from the Madoff scheme? This big. Then it's on to a history lesson and related cocktail. The lesson: Why General Grant was bad for the Jews. The drink: an ounce of bourbon, an ounce of apple brandy, sugar or honey topped with hot water, a mix of North and South. An interview with David Fincher, director of "Benjamin Button." A food segment about mozzarella, including mozzarella restaurants and bars like Obikà in New York. A 30-second music clip (Low's "Just Like Christmas,"). Time to party. Get the cheat sheet. Fun concept. Length: 13:51 minutes. Released: Dec. 19.

"Books on the Nightstand #20: Sci-Fi for the Rest of Us" Do you read the book, or the e-book? Like the hosts, I do both. They're using Sony Readers, and I use a Kindle, but the advantage of e-books for travel is clear in either case. In fact, I plan to be reading my Kindle for a couple of hours today on a flight out west. (I don't care for extended reading on my iPhone, though there are several e-book apps.) I used to strain my back lugging books on trips so I wouldn't be caught without something. Another segment focused on science fiction picks for people who don't like SF, including "Stranger in a Strange Land," by Robert A. Heinlein. I grok the choice, though it's not for everyone and I don't think the pitch here -- "fish out of water story" -- does it justice. Other picks in the podcast included "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell, "Life Class" by Pat Barker, and "Firmin" by Sam Savage. As podcasts, and book discussions, go, this did not strike me as particularly deep or compelling, but I may give it another chance later. Length: 18:18. Released: Dec. 17.
Coffeegeek Podcast 64: Carl Sara Rocks This podcast is infrequently updated but my quest for the perfect espresso shot seemed to require more research, so I grabbed the most recent episode, from August. Intro/outro is Sinatra singing the jaunty "Coffee Song." The host, Mark Prince, founder of the excellent Coffeegeek.com, started by apologizing for a two-month delay pledged to get on a weekly schedule. Didn't happen. Oh, well. (The other day, I sent an e-mail asking what was up, but did not get a reply yet.) This episode is notable for Prince's grievance, discussed at length, about a "backlash to the pursuit of culinary coffee" that he sees in the mainstream media. He blames the bad economy. He says the U.S. coffee market breaks down this way: 80 percent of the people are "the untouchables... They are satisfied with Folgers and the junk around the office." He wants to reach the other 20 percent, including 1 to 2 percent who are culinary coffee experts, 6 to 8 percent who understand and love it but "they're not quite convinced the effort is worth it"; and 10 percent who may have had a cup or two and are open to it but they think it means Starbucks. "They don't know what culinary coffee is yet. They know it exists." He goes on a digression about iced espresso (the gist: to avoid a sour taste, brew the espresso into a cold cup, not directly into the ice). Back to the backlash. He blames a Burger King mentality in the U.S. "In a lot of cases the customer is always right," he explains. "But when it comes to the delivery of a culinary product, and you have a reputation you want to protect as a business for delivering a culinary product, I'm sorry, there are certain lines that a customer can't cross, and they can't ask you to do things in a certain way if you believe it is detrimental to the quality of the beverage. And I do blame Burger King for that for their 'have it your way' campaign." Of course, he says, "commodity or utility coffee" at Starbucks or McDonald's is O.K. in a pinch, but don't drink the stuff in the hotel room. At 38:15 minutes, a list of "awesome" coffee beans, followed by a recorded interview with Carl Sara, a New Zealand coffee champion, which takes up the rest of the podcast. Then Sinatra takes us out. Length: 1 hour, 27 minutes. Released: Aug. 9, 2008.
Stuff You Should Know This is a great find from the How Stuff Works folks, with a place on the iTunes "Best Podcasts of 2008" list. The hosts Josh and Chuck take apart a topic scientifically in about 17 minutes per show. On this one, we learn that flirting is a form of language important to our survival as a species, with a discussion of the ambiguous protean gestures preferred by women in flirting. I also listened to the previous two episodes about the safest parts of your body to take a bullet (answer: hands or feet), and eco-friendly ways to get rid of a body. All were entertaining and informative. Length: 17:29 minutes. Released: Dec. 23.
New York Review of Books Podcast Compared to some of the stuff I have reviewed, this is laid-back, ruminative stuff from the bastion of New York liberal intellectualism. First I listened to this 17-minute interview with the veteran Washington correspondent Elizabeth Drew about the Obama transition, cabinet picks and other issues, based on her N.Y.R.B. article "The Truth About the Election." My takeaway is that she thinks Obama was different from other Democratic candidates in that he had been working on his message, plan and staffing long before the election itself, making his transition rather smooth. We'll see. The more recent 50-minute podcast is a recording of the 2008 Robert B. Silvers lecture by the novelist Zadie Smith, delivered at the New York Public Library on Dec. 5. Silvers is the editor of the review and delivers introductory remarks. It was framed as a lecture about lecturing. The description: "Drawing on literary and historical examples from Elizabeth I to Eliza Doolittle to Barack Obama, Zadie Smith explores race, writing, and what it means when we speak in different ways to different people." There's a lot more Obama than this description suggests, and a bit more about mixed race and the duality of language. She has a take on Obama -- "the man from Dream City" -- that is far more poetic than Drew's nuts-and-bolts assessment. In that respect, the two podcast episodes complement one another neatly. Length: 17:27 minutes and 59:05 minutes. Released: Dec. 15 and 19.
The Futile Podcast: M.A.D. Men The action movie podcast. This episode was billed as a discussion of "preachy movies that are remakes of movies that were preachy about avoiding nuclear annihilation, or what was known ... as M.A.D., or mutually assured destruction." But it's mostly about the recent remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still," with Keanu Reeves and the guy from "Mad Men." Overall review: "This movie sucks, but it doesn't." Beware of spoilers, if that matters to you. In the case of htis movie, maybe not. A couple of days after I listened to this, another podcast dropped, about the original "Lethal Weapon," but I haven't listened to that yet. Length: 23:15 minutes. Released: Dec. 20.
Uhh Yeah Dude, Episode 146 Great episode. Topics include 50 Cent's fight with Floyd Mayweather, cameras hidden in the baby Jesus, cellphones for the dead, the new Burger King fragrance, adult video awards, the Michael Phelps video game, and Z-mailing, similar to sleep-eating, in which people send inappropriate e-mail while asleep. Jonathan: "Can't we just get back to sleep-dreaming?" Seth: "I was listening to U.Y.D. and the two hosts of the show have trained themselves to sleep-dream, where they fall asleep, they create almost movies in their head, I guess is how they would describe it. Literally, they'll think about people in their lives, not in their lives, who have been in their lives, in situations where they'll be in a house, but it's not really their house, it's their childhood home. They call it sleep-dreaming." Hey, that's happened to me. I dreamed podcasters were watching me in my sleep. Length: 1 hour, 7 Minutes. Released: Dec. 22.
This Week in Tech 174: 10-Ferret Night Leo Laporte dispenses with tech for another appearance (recorded earlier this month) by John Hodgman, who is still on his book tour. Leo interviewed Hodgman the week of Nov. 2. This time they are joined by his friend Jonathan Coulton, a Brooklyn singer-songwriter beloved by nerds and geeks. There's no point in summarizing the discussion, which is entertaining and well worth a listen if you are a fan of their work, as I am. A few topics: Hodgman's career as a literary agent, the throwing of shoes at the president, the availability of Crystal Head Vodka, quahogs, and two things Laporte learned from his father: "Rummies have no wind, so you can outrun them. And never catch the eye of a hobo." There's more, plus Coulton music. Length: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Released: Dec. 21.

The Post Office has become the department of print spam, an agency that delivers trash for us to recycle. I pay most of my bills online, and do most of my reading digitally (computer, iPhone or Kindle); I subscribe to fewer and fewer print magazines and have no use for catalogs. So it's great when the mail includes something I want to read. Last week, that was the 200-page issue No. 7 of N+1, entitled "Correction." A few years ago, Tony Scott wrote an essay about the earnest young New York writers who started N+1. On a whim, I bought a lifetime subscription. (They still sell them for $200.) It seemed like a good deal, even for a journal with an uncertain publication schedule, now described as twice a year. The cover price is $11.95 per issue, so I have yet to break even. (The founders went on to write first novels -- both enjoyable but slight -- or become literary fixtures, and they have tangled with the gossip blogs now and then).

N+1 feels right in print. Despite the promise of "Web only" content once or twice a week, I rarely visit its Web site, which is odd behavior for me, given that most of my news is filtered through blogs or social media like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and Delicious. (There is some good stuff there, like this article about being a student of David Foster Wallace). An infrequently published print journal of incoherent aims is an anachronism, to be sure, but an enjoyable one -- the news writ slow. I devour it in a way I do not devour The New Yorker, which tends to pile up into a tall stack that taunts me until at last, weeks behind, I skim wildly, looking for the articles people went out of their way to mention. "Did you see in The New Yorker..." Well, yes, I saw it.

This issue of N+1 was not a disappointment. It was perfect like hot coffee on a cold November morning. Here's how it went down:

The Intellectual Situation The front of the book is usually engaging, and this issue does not disappoint, with a humorous series of "ironic" corrections. Other items include a discussion of the next president as an American Gorbachev ("The America our new president inherits bears an uncanny resemblance to our old enemy, the Soviet Union -- right before it went under"), an overview of the new Jewish magazines, an argument for literary incoherence and a few other odds and ends.

Politics/Blood Sausage The highlight of this section is the continuation of the series of enlightening interviews with an anonymous hedge fund manager as the economy collapsed this fall. It is insightful and the best article in the issue. I won't be surprised if N+1 relocates from New York to a squat in an abandoned Florida McMansion. The onetime blogger A.S. Hamrah (Suck.com -- now that takes me back) delivers an interesting overview of films released during the Iraq War, from "Pearl Harbor" to "The Dark Knight." Then we have three poems by the cult poet of dogshit and ball gags, Frederick Seidel. The rhymes seem cheap, but he's won some big awards, so what do I know? ("The homeless are popping like pimples," he writes. Sure they are.) Mark Greif delivers an entertaining but slightly hard to follow high-concept essay, "On Food." (Greif, incidentally, doesn't care for the show "Mad Men," but he wrote the best essay about it anywhere, for the London Review of books.) I wasn't in the mood for the play that followed, something about Nazis, so I skipped it.

Home and Away And so we find ourselves in the middle of the book, with a story "The Family Friend" by Ceridwen Dovey, the author of the novel "Blood Kin." It's like one of those New Yorker stories I never read. That doesn't mean it's not good. It just means I didn't finish it. This is followed by a Benjamin Kunkel essay about anonymity and identity on the Internet, with charts. I like anything with charts, but I think Greif has won this issue's high-concept contest (there is nothing in the issue under the byline of co-founder Keith Gessen, though perhaps he wrote this). This is followed by Elif Batuman's "Summer in Samarkand," and Jace Clayton's "Confessions of a DJ," neither of which I read. Sorry! Maybe I'll get back to them.

Reviews Wesley Yang writes about the rise of the sleazy "seduction community," young men who practice a form of sexual manipulation, which started out before the Web on Usenet and found its way to best-selling books ("The Game" by Neil Strauss) and TV shows ("The Pickup Artist," starring Mystery), with concepts like the "neg" and the "wingman." Then Molly Young -- also a contributor here -- reviews Adderall, the much-abused ADHD drug (My advice: Stick to espresso.) A version of this article was first published as "Web only" content on N+1 in January when it drew some attention. Maybe it's not real until it sees print.