Doggy Bag: Sweeping Panorama?

​Our favorite morsel from the blogs.

Off the page: Andrew Simmons files a review of McSweeney's San Francisco Panorama for Bay Area Bites. It's a look at how print abides, even when the form is uncompelling. Simmons:

What I am actually interested in is how Panorama's food pages might potentially epitomize a new ideal for the framing of food stories, recipes, and related visual content in print, and how that could possibly trickle down to the under-funded and under-valued realm of real daily newspapers.

Cool. And this:

I can't exactly remember the last time I read the print version of a food story from either the Chronicle or the New York Times, but as I recall, nothing about the content ― fairly short articles, bullet points in boxes, a few color photographs, ads, and the odd graphic, laid out in columns ― tends to speak dramatically to the particulars of the form ― large folds of paper.

Some of Simmons' points are as engaging as a KenKen challenge, but you leave it feeling that Panorama, for all the hype, is merely a better designed version of the Sunday magazine section. After all, isn't the ramen charticle by David Chang and Peter Meehan an elaborate ad for their book, Momofuku? And isn't that the oldest frame in publishing?