内容摘要：As happens with many innovations, the Like button was born out of necessity but it wasn’t the brainchild of a single person. The concept percolated for more than a decade in Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it.

As happens with many innovations, the Like button was born out of necessity but it wasn’t the brainchild of a single person. The concept percolated for more than a decade in Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it.

1984 novel “Bright Lights, Big City,” and the restaurant was a regular hangout for celebrities fromNearly five decades and 19 restaurants later, McNally’s Balthazar in SoHo, Minetta Tavern in New York and D.C., and other restaurants are still going strong. In his candid, funny and poignant memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything,” McNally, 73, shows that he is, too.

But it might not have been that way. The book opens with a 2018 suicide attempt, sparked by back pain, a crumbling marriage and the aftereffects of a 2016 stroke which left him with aphasia and a paralyzed right hand.Work — building and operating restaurants — helped keep him going. And with his speech distorted, he found a creative outlet in Instagram, where his filter-free screeds on everything — from dealing with his stroke to Balthazar’s evening recap by staff — often go viral.“In some ways, it was only after I lost my voice that I learned to speak my mind,” he writes.

In his memoir, McNally charts his unlikely success story from a working-class teen actor raised in Bethnal Green, London, to being dubbed “The Restaurateur Who Invented Downtown” in his heyday of the 1980s and ’90s.His exacting eye for lighting and ambiance and charming touches in his restaurants — he sends a gratis glass of champagne to solo diners at Balthazar, and often filled the “cheap” $15 carafe of wine at the now-defunct Schiller’s with his finest bottles — have turned countless customers into regulars at his establishments.

McNally’s memoir lets readers sidle up to the bar and feel like regulars in his life, too.

Sophie Gilbert, a London-based staff writer for the Atlantic magazine, has taken a survey of the Anglo-American pop culture landscape, and her findings aren’t pretty. In a new book, “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves” she concludes that after decades of social and political progress for women, the patriarchy has come roaring back in the 21st century with the new-old belief that women’s proper place is in the kitchen and bedroom, not the boardroom or the military.A man pushes his cart with discarded plastic items and cartons at Kadikoy district in Istanbul, Turkey, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

A man pushes his cart with discarded plastic items and cartons at Kadikoy district in Istanbul, Turkey, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)Dogan’s cousin, 28-year-old Ergun Dogan, Ergun’s younger brother Mehmet Dogan, 16, and their father, Serdar Dogan are also trash scavengers.

The cousin recounts how, if a sack on his cart accidentally touches a passer-by, the person often gets upset and tell him to “get your dirty thing away from me.”Cumali Bakir, who oversees a recycling depot and buys from collectors like the Dogan cousins, says their jobs should be made official, and that they should be given proper “vests and meal cards.”