Roger Ebert: No Longer an Eater, Still a Cook

Joe Raymond for The New York Times
Chaz Ebert, left, with her husband, Roger, who uses gestures, looks and a notebook to communicate.
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: August 31, 2010

THE first several minutes at a restaurant with Roger Ebert are awkward.

It’s not that you can’t find a million things to discuss. Mr. Ebert, 68, has reviewed movies for more than four decades. He’s driven around with Robert Mitchum while the actor got stoned and lost on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He once owned a 1957 Studebaker and still owns a Pulitzer Prize.

The thing is, he doesn’t eat and he doesn’t talk. Or rather, he can’t eat and he can’t talk. He hasn’t for four years, ever since cancer took his lower jaw, and three attempts to rebuild his face and his voice failed. More

A Chef in His Getaway Galley

Steve Johnson, the chef and owner of Rendezvous in Cambridge, Mass., on his houseboat anchored off Westport, Mass.
By JULIA MOSKIN
Published: August 31, 2010

ON a recent sunny Friday, Steve Johnson steered his skiff up the mouth of the Westport River, just down the coast from New Bedford. As terns wheeled overhead, fantasies of exotic summer destinations fell away. Who needs Bali when you’ve got a houseboat tied up in an estuary off Rhode Island Sound, and a mess of just-dug clams for lunch? More

Google’s Earth

By WILLIAM GIBSON
Published: August 31, 2010

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers. More

Freeing Muscadet From a Pigeonhole

By ERIC ASIMOV
Published: August 30, 2010

THE subject today is Muscadet, so let’s dispense with the obvious right away: oysters. Most people, if they know one important thing about Muscadet, know that oysters are its natural partner. More

Oxford Dictionary 3rd Edition.com?

Published: August 31, 2010

The head of Oxford University Press, Nigel Portwood, recently caused a stir by openly considering the possibility that the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary might be published in electronic form only. What prompted those thoughts was the success of the online version of the O.E.D., as it is usually called, and the limited sales of the printed 20-volume edition. More