Something resembling a pain au chocolat

Chocolate-chip cookies were so terrible as to have to be thrown out. Croissants edible but brioche-like and thus a failure. Cannelés: convin...

"That's why men hunt and women nest."

Amanda Marcotte asks , "Is there any facet of life that can't be filtered through the bizarre belief that men and women are fundame...

A December to Remember

-Homemade bread. A lovely idea, especially for those of us who live far from supermarkets let alone these mythological establishments called...

America, 2011

I decided to trade sleep for a quicker, earlier train into New York. As you might imagine, it’s more popular to spend one hour getting into...

Case closed

Perhaps in an effort to win over the Unsolicited Character Witness To Glamorous Person award from a certain Ivy League prof , Garance Doré h...

Gifts that keep on giving

The latest in the NYT do-gooder-gifts series is from Mark Bittman . While it's closer to reasonable than the last installment , it has i...

Potatoes big and small

The academia story of the moment is about the professor who may or may not have been fired for giving an actor and known academic Renaissanc...

Rhoda scholarship: a staycation post

Hulu provides only the first three seasons of the "Mary Tyler Moore Show," and the volume on my computer doesn't get very loud...

Teacup violins

I think the NYT heard me claim that I wasn't going to read any more of its lifestyle articles beginning Jan. 1, and decided to do whate...

Early New Year's Resolutions*

-Write The Small Dog Workout Book . Inspired by this NYT reader comment; socialite, reality TV star, and incredibly tall woman Kelly Bensim...

Some ID

This was, all told, a crummy day in non-tragic but still-frustrating respects. But one particular highlight was that at Wegman's - remem...

Two before their time

Sad news . Re: Christopher Hitchens, I assume readers of WWPD have read at least as much by him as I have, and judging by Twitter perhaps g...

"[A] commercialized selfish jewess"

The Christmas thing. As I've explained before, and will need to do each year, there are a whole lot of Jews in this country (hi!) who we...

Truffles Quarterly

Jennifer Steinhauer is appalled that other moms in her well-to-do West Coast milieu are not bringing home-baked goods to bakesales. She men...

Inadvertent outdoorsiness

I'm going to take the opportunity to brag-complain (bragplain?) about having biked to Wegman's over the weekend, which is to say ver...

Her little den

Took Bisou to the Dinky station to see Jo off (the astrophysicists are conferring). Walked her back. This is a half-hour each way. Does Biso...

Where Nice Guys meet That Guys meet PUAs

Found this gem via Facebook: "A Girl You Should Date," advice, presumably, to the young man who fancies himself an intellectual. ...

Give a dog a cone

Thanks to Isabel Archer (the blogger, not the protagonist), I have yet another reason to feel dog-guilt: after Bisou was spayed, she wore fo...

Cannelazy UPDATED

In the spirit of pro-kitchen-gadgetry, I might mention the great success that was finally making cannelés, months after my mother got me a s...

"Pluck your own chickens."

Via Nick Troester , I see that Megan McArdle and I are on the same page when it comes to kitchen gadgets. I also now see that McArdle ca...

"A little misogynist"

"Girl" or "girls" appears five times in this groundbreaking Styles  piece about socialites who are also beauty-industry...

Second attempts

-Sometimes I write a whopper of a post, and it will then occur to me a few days later that what I'd meant to convey could have been done...

On looking as stylish as possible while writing a dissertation in the woods with a poodle and some scientists

Need a change of hairstyle, and considering a return to one of the old standbies: bangs or ombré. Bangs have the advantages of, I could stil...

In defense of mannequins

As I've mentioned on this blog before, it's eerie, if you stop and think about it, that in this day and age, there's a professio...

Forage for your porridge

I can't seem to get that "food" issue of the New Yorker our of my head. Growing one's own tomatoes on Cape Cod. Shucking ...