Yesterday the Voice's food writer Robert Sietsema wrote an open letter to Mr. Ozersky, criticizing him for his latest column about the food at his wedding — lasagna and cake provided by celebrity chefs that the groom couldn't afford.

"You don't make clear in the article how or if you paid for all this booty," wrote Mr. Sietsema yesterday. "Nowhere in the article does it say, 'I paid the chefs fair price for the services and products they provided, and Jeffrey Chodorow for the place where the banquet was held,' which is what a journalist who acquired these services and then wrote about them should have done."

"The most painful part of the article for me is the headline, in which you declare yourself a food critic," he added. Mr. Ozersky's column was titled "Tips from a Newly Married Critic."

Ms. Ozersky has now added a "clarification" to his column. He's not a critic, despite what the headline says.

I am not an anonymous critic and I don't review restaurants for TIME (or anyone else). I comment and enlarge on trends on gastronomy, which I stay aware of by being close to chefs. I love my chef friends, and wanted to share their food with my other friends.

Just like all those blogers who aren't vodka critics, but need to keep up with the latest trends in free booze.

Back in July, I interviewed Mr. Ozersky and asked if he had any interest in being an old-fashioned restaurant critic.

"The Times critic can't go on TV!" he said. "What would you do with that power? You can't go to the restaurants you like, you can't shmooze with the chefs and writers you like. You can't go on Top Chef!"

"As far as I'm concerned, you have to be on television," he continued. "You can win the National Book Award and you can write on the front page of The Times every day, and you're still not as famous as some busty tramp on Tough Love on VH1."

“The men, both lawyers, both from Illinois, were seeking the presidency, despite what seemed their crippling connection with extremists. Each was young by modern standards for a president. … Their political experience was mainly provincial, in the Illinois legislature for both of them, and they had received little exposure at the national level. … Yet each was seeking his party’s nomination against a New York senator of longer standing and greater prior reputation. … They were both known for having opposed an initially popular war—Lincoln against President Polk’s Mexican War, raised on the basis of a fictitious provocation; Obama against President Bush’s Iraq War. …”

Let’s make sure the paths diverge after Mr. Obama’s second inaugural address.

IN HONOR OF Earth Day, a selection from Bill McKibben’s handsome, generous anthology of environmental writing, American Earth (Library of America, $40). This is from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949):

“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”

RICHARD BAUSCH'S 11TH novel, Peace (Knopf, $19.95), is a war story, short, precise and entirely convincing. Set in Italy on a winter’s night in 1944, it focuses with single-minded intensity on an American recon squad—three soldiers and an old Italian man who’s been commandeered as their guide—trudging up and down a mountain in the freezing rain, then snow, with a sniper dogging their footsteps. The simplicity and grace of the language brings to mind the best of Hemingway, while the direct, unpretentious unspooling of extreme emotional states reminds me of Ian McEwan. Mr. Bausch’s characters are all his own, however: each soldier as vivid and distinct as an old friend. Peace is one of those strange, compelling novels that manages to be beautiful in a heartbeat and horrifying in the next.

DOES JOSH OZERSKY take his burgers seriously? Yes, indeed. Even a quick glance at his brief, energetic cultural history, The Hamburger (Yale, $22), reveals a passionate commitment to America’s iconic sandwich. Here for example, he heatedly denies that a beef patty on toast qualifies as the genuine item:

“No, there is no doubt: on any kind of semantic or platonic level, no bun = no burger. … To admit ground beef on toast as a hamburger is to make the idea of a ‘hamburger’ so loose, so abstract, so semiotically promiscuous as to have no meaning.”