24 hour party person Melena Ryzik asks in the Times Style section: Is the Box is still edgy? Nicely put: "Originally billed as a Moulin Rouge-style theater of the extreme, the Box has mostly settled into its role as a purveyor of kitschy, Las Vegas-style exotica and extremely pricey drinks." [NYT]

Melena Ryzik, the one-time sharp-elbowed Times Boldface Names party stringer who went on to write that paper's daily culture email Urban Eye, has gone fulltime for the Times culture desk. We hear Urban Eye is looking for a new... email-blogger? Direct-mailer? What shall we call these new modern forms of journalism? Better find out fast, because these are the jobs of our time. Update: We hear she's keeping Urban Eye as part of the new job. What can't she do???

The parenthesis in 20th century poetry has a long and heralded past from Yeats and Browning to cummings and Bishop. But perhaps no one has mastered the use of the lunulae as well as Times reporter and UrbanEye e-letter scribe Melena Ryzik. Perusing her articles one is struck by the epigrammatic parenthetical asides that glitter like diamonds in the rough crazy of her prose.