I have to ask

A common thread in my life thus far is living in places meant for people with far more $$$ than I've got. Living in Battery Park City...

Sanford and Toulouse

I'd been thinking of the Trayvon Martin and Toulouse cases, how they relate, or don't, in terms of parochialism in emotional respons...

Appropriate behavior

I've been somewhat following the story of how some employers are now demanding Facebook passwords, or Facebook "friendship," o...

Quote of the day

I’m inferring that you and your wife would prefer, and understand better, an arugula-eating son toiling on a doctorate in comparative litera...

A view from the provinces

-Bisou-walk podcast of the morning: Leonard Lopate on the NYU expansion plan. Not entirely the show's fault that there was no pro-plan g...

Utterly frivolous things I might buy if they cost half what they do

-Yves Klein Blue nail polish . But at $20 plus $7.50 for shipping... -$70 galaxy-print scarf . -Neon yellow-green J. Crew chino shorts. Same...

The Kimmelman Center

It's not every day NYU grad students get sneered at in the paper of record, but Michael Kimmelman has a go at it, complaining about, of...

New life goal

Get a picture of myself, furious and finger raised, arguing in defense of Israel in front of an iconic New York supermarket.

GAR!

Well gee thanks, Paul Rudnick and the New Yorker , for running off with my   fabulous   idea .

Cellulite as natural disaster

A man writes to Prudie to complain that his wife has cellulite. This is, apologies to Kate Harding , a bit like writing in to complain that...

"Home"

Ned Resnikoff has set out some WWPD bait. I'm reminded, of course, of how I, a genuine self-identified Zionist, managed to get on the o...

Anti-Semitism as natural disaster

Like some of the paper's other readers, I was struck by the choice of the NYT to conduct man-on-the-street interviews reacting to the T...

Annals of the useless

Asking a 15-year-old actress how she gets such shiny hair, which lip balm she prefers, and what she does for exercise. Really, NYT? Some te...

This, despite the recent purchase of tempeh

I'm not sure whether this was classic dissertation-writer's procrastination, or a well of contrarianism born of a unprecedentedly un...

For a change, trains, France, food, and Jews

-File under obvious, but I wouldn't recommend NJ Transit on St. Patrick's Day. We got seats, because ( as per usual ) there were emp...

Toulouse school shooting UPDATED

Yes, following this . And, other than that it's incredibly upsetting, I don't have much to say at this point. Whether the killer was...

Remind me why people agree to be quoted by NYT lifestyle reporters.

Sometimes, tragedy strikes : Their price range included “places we thought we could talk down to $1.2 million,” said Ms. Rondeau, 37. She is...

Resistance (to) training

In the midst of the contraception-coverage debacle, a very har har article came out, listing other amenities the government might mandate t...

Such a chore

There was evidently some study, coming out of UCLA, that shows that American middle-class kids are brats, while their Samoan equivalents ar...

Incentives

Now that my shopping is limited to whichever supermarkets the shuttle goes to, I go back and forth between preferring Wegman's and Whole...

Intermediaries

Soon after reading that article about blacks at Stuyvesant , the dog-walking podcast of the day was an interview with the author of Our Blac...

Le bike, c'est chic

The NYT Style magazine is evidently gearing up (sorry) for a bicycle-themed issue, given how many of its recent posts are biking-themed. As...

Two-buck Chuck

Charles Murray, over truffles, a gin-brand-specified martini, and a $100-plus bottle o' wine, complains , “'[I]n academia their [eli...

WWPD's weekend "Lifestyle" section

-The food movement is full of paradoxes and contradictions. On the one hand, we are asked to avoid processed foods, added sweeteners, and so...

My aspirational pants

Thanks Whitney ! Mom jeans are back , after all. In the words of His Sartorialousness: Trust me, French young ladies are still the ones to l...

Johan the Plumber

When the rest of socially-liberal American womankind was still worried that we were looking at a Santorum presidency (or are we still?), I w...

Dan Savage's blind spot, continued

Dan Savage just received, reprinted, and responded to an excellent letter from a reader. The reader notes, correctly, that Savage gets a lo...

On the Charles Murray op-ed

Yes. No. Kind of. Kind of. Slightly longer version: Murray suggests  four ways to bridge the gap "between the professional and working ...

Headline of the day

" Charged as Madam, and Defended as Entrepreneur and Pig Rescuer "

Feminist issues vs. women's issues

I mentioned Emily Bazelon's response to the Limbaugh debacle in an update to the earlier post , but since that one's getting unwiel...

Real issues vs. women's issues

As a rule, I don't think that only members of Group X should be allowed to weigh in on issues concerning Group X. But maybe it's not...

Bread and noses

-Kei has inspired me to try again with bread- and croissant-making, and possibly to buy the book she's using. (I had this romantic not...

A private matter UPDATED

All of the discussions lately about contraception - so much catchier than the Big Political Issues, and yet more hard-news than whatever els...

A barista named Kale

I finally got my hands on Charles Murray's Coming Apart , which is to say, now that the book and all the commentary about it by those wh...