Paid to read books

"I get paid to read books!" This sentence - always with the exclamation mark - is the easiest way to identify a new humanities gra...

Friday's assortment

-We've established that  Rejected White College Applicant is entitled, just as we caught a similarly barrel-dwelling fish when we confi...

More on the eternal must-art-be-nice question

I have no intention of seeing the movie "Spring Breakers," having been traumatized at 15 or so by Korine's "Kids," a...

Sweeping

When the "Girls" backlash (and backlash to backlash...) first broke, and everyone was saying that the show was too white, my thoug...

It's spring o'clock somewhere

There was a time - it was warmer out, and I lived in the city - when the idea of eating strictly local seemed, if not practical , exactly, t...

The ultimate busman's-holiday post

-There's a new production of Romeo and Juliet, and while Romeo is white, controversy of controversies, Juliet is black. Having not given...

Holistic and its victims, sympathetic and otherwise

Gawker reports  that a scorned college-applicant has taken to the Wall Street Journal to complain that "just be[ing] yourself" is...

April showers bring frizz

Seemingly in honor of today's date, there are not one but two declarations that curly hair is something other than an imperfection to ...

An Easter Monday-not-April-Fools post

There's a certain branch of Judaism that consists of one principle (no, principal! thank you commenter-copy-editing) tenet: the non-cele...

Potato-sack

The Jezebel ring-threads I find so fascinating now have a companion piece: the comments on a personal essay about one woman's journey ...

"How could anybody not like you?" - Helen Seinfeld

At the intersection of parental overshare and the window-of-opportunity problem: the Princeton University mom who wrote a letter to a Pri...

Demure

Back in the day, a certain cult-of-personality English teacher (not, I believe, in the sinister sense ) at my high school, in a class dedica...

On "Josh" and "Seth"

I will admit that I first read  this reference to TV writers as "white dudes with names like Josh or Seth" as a bit Jews-control-...

Your friends, your politics

The anti-same-sex-marriage-from-the-left arguments keep on popping up (along with passionate arguments about whether it is sheep-like or a n...

"My muffin-top is all that, whole grain, low fat" - Jenna Maroney

Ron Rosenbaum has written a contrarian defense of fat-the-ingredient . ( Via Mark Bittman , who so could have torn this apart, but must have...

News and commentary

I know I should follow the Supreme Court news from the newspaper. And I am. These are exciting times! But the Facebook response is so compel...

Bad kids

I hadn't written anything about Steubenville thus far because I felt I had nothing to add. Rape is terrible and deserves to be punished....

Too brilliant to bathe, home edition

Emily Shire, weighing in on the gender-and-messiness debate: And just think about how messy men are portrayed in popular culture. An unkemp...

Great moments in fashion cluelessness

"I think she is a great reference for young professional women." So says the Sartorialist, and just below is a photo of the woman...

$90 yoga pants revisited

In a recent post on materialism, I gave Lululemon yoga pants as an example of a desired but not that desired purchase. I would like to be a...

"Close proximity to livestock"

Today I finally made it to the nearby  Cherry Grove Farm , which is the only sort of farm in the area of much interest in this produce-barre...

"Young and impulsive"

Caryatis pointed me to this (relatively tame)  Savage Love letter , from a 28-year-old man with a 28-year-old husband he'd been with si...

Goes around, comes around

Maybe these things are cyclical, because this doesn't feel entirely new, but it seems we've rediscovered that middle school is awful...

"On paper" UPDATED

Sometimes we all make assumptions. For instance, I'd assume an American Jewish woman of a certain generation would be familiar with what...

Six

When I've written about parental overshare , my focus has been on published articles and memoirs written by the parents themselves. It...

Holistic's winners and losers

Miss Self-Important has a post up on affirmative action and holistic admissions. WWPD readers may be familiar with my apparently bizarre st...

Emerged adulthood

Lena Dunham's New Yorker essay about how puppies are nice was what finally permitted me to articulate what it is about Dunham's per...

"[O]pportunities to work for free"

Matthew Yglesias has been defending unpaid internships with a lesser-evil argument: they're better than pricey grad school. Specifically...

Again with the lattes

You who are young and broke, did you know that buying coffee out every day costs more than not doing so? For what is, I estimate, the ten bi...

Your to-read list for the day

-Flavia's post on some not-useful new-pope commentary. -Stephen Metcalf on the brand that is Brooklyn. -Robert Huber on race in Philad...