I want to apologize publicly to all the strangers I have run into on the street while texting someone, emailing someone, or not paying attention to traffic lights, where I was going, or really anything that isn’t my phone. It’s a problem I have: I’m a multi-tasker, for lack of a prettier word. I am a sucker for appliances with several uses—it chops and it dices! I like combination exercise classes—it’s yoga and it’s rock climbing! When I cook, I […]
A Girl on Mad Men: Everyone Likes to Go to the Movies When They’re Sad (“The Flood” Season 6, Episode 5)
This might seem like a shallow way to start a recap, but hey, as Ginsburg’s date Beverly says, I’m shallow, so here goes. Guys, Peggy is wearing my coat. Or really I’m wearing Peggy’s coat. I bought it when I was 17 years old: a powder blue trench with brass buttons and a modish collar. And there she is, the day after the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination breaks, wearing it because it has started to rain. I bought […]
A Girl on Mad Men: Tonight We’re Just a Couple of Young Secretaries (S6/E4 “To Have and to Hold”)
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.
The Reading Life: Lovely Lydia Davis Quotes And This Year’s Prank
My father sent me an email from Seattle the other day to tell me he doesn’t like Seattle very much, despite all the wonderful things you can find there. He has a running list, I think, of cities he dislikes. Most people who travel for business must keep something similar on reserve. It amuses me to hear vehement distaste for places I have never seen. The words “Pittsburgh” and “Orlando” are hilarious when said with disgust.
A Girl Watching Mad Men: Dancing with the One Who Brung You (S6/E3 “The Collaborators)
There was a theme of infidelity being batted around in this episode of Mad Men. Did you notice? Everyone is literally coveting their neighbors’ wives. Pete cheats on Trudy (and she knows it, too, which is amazing and awful at the same time) with the lady across the street, and Don cheats on Megan with Linda Cardellini one floor down. The consequences of these actions vary: domestic violence on Pete’s end, breathy warnings against falling in love on Don’s. I […]
The Reading Life: Around Ten A.M. and Missing Achewood like a Lord
On an email thread yesterday, our own Tobias Carroll was goofing around like he does, and, perhaps off topic, he linked to an old Achewood comic. That link might not make any sense to you. If this were a few years ago, I wouldn’t feel like I have to explain to a reader what Achewood is. There was a brief moment, at least from my cultural vantage point, of deserved recognition for the web comic. In 2007 the comic’s website […]
The Reading Life: Nikolai Gogol and New York Real Estate
For a month, I’m living in the second bedroom of my aunt’s apartment in Cobble Hill. She’s not my aunt, and it’s not in Cobble Hill, but these things are easier to say than “my family friend who’s so close that she’s family” and “the Columbia Waterfront District.” I needed a place to stay, and she needed a subletter for the month of March. She has a cat; I have a cat. It works. I’ve lived with her before: my […]
Proust Visits New York
This year we celebrate the centennial of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, the first volume in a set of books everyone you know has promised to read, and therefore the only volume everyone you know is sure to have read. To commemorate the event, the Morgan Library has assembled a room of Proustian memorabilia.