There is an art to any form. The mishmash of science story with lifestyle trend is a specialty of New York magazine, and today Mark Adams takes it to dizzying, gorgeous heights in a story about coffee. Coffee! The silent, seductive brown menace that lurks all around us! Perhaps you've even had some today! How will it hurt you? How will it prevent you from having more babies? Let's break it down.

The opening wacky yet chilling anecdote. ("Dare knows that drinking 30 shots of espresso every day probably isn't great for him.")

The turn. ("Michael Dare may be an extreme example, but his story is still telling.")

The facts. ("Americans have been guzzling copious, recently unprecedented, amounts of java.... Per capita national coffee consumption, which had been on the decline since the forties, has risen almost 20 percent since 1995....")

The somewhat dubious pump-up of the facts. ("[T]he amount of caffeine we consume has almost surely shot up even more than that." Oooh, so close to "surely.")

The trend-story pathologization. ("In a relatively short amount of time, we have become a nation of caffeine addicts." Eek!)

The utterly retarded and needless expert quote. ("'It makes people feel good, it increases their arousal and alertness, and makes them more friendly and sociable and talkative,' says Laura Juliano, an American University psychology professor, coffee researcher, and substance-dependence expert." Oh my God, it does?)

The scare, aka the "I'm Rich So What Happened To My Baby" moment. ("Large daily doses may also be a factor in female infertility.")

The mounting terror. ("Research has shown that drinking just 100 milligrams of caffeine a day (an eight-ounce cup of almost any type contains at least that much) is enough to develop a dependence and trigger withdrawal symptoms.")

The counterintuitive advice based on "recent studies." ("Recent studies, some of them funded by the military in order to calibrate peak performance of combatants, have demonstrated that instead of dosing ourselves with caffeine bombs two or three—or in Michael Dare's case, six—times daily, we'd probably get better results from caffeine by taking in multiple small amounts throughout the day.")

The return to the single anecdote. ("Since all but quitting caffeine, he reported, he'd been dozing off faster and sleeping more soundly at night, with no measurable drop-off in productivity during the day.")