Horror is a genre I avoid. Halloween used to make it palatable, shrinking the monsters and taming irrational fears into catharsis. Then we grew scared of our own rituals. Rosy apples held razor blades! Candy was poisoned! Neighborhood kids now go to the Baptists’ Trunk or Treat instead of knocking on people’s doors, […]
The “living dead” are neither living nor dead, but they possess incredible longevity in our culture. But have we ever stopped to consider what the zombie apocalypse genre has done for us, if not to us? Prophesying scenarios about the end of the world is not new. According to scholars, zombies are […]
To paraphrase the old riddle from cosmology: if the arrival of fall is the answer, what is the question? Maybe: How will we know we are released from our summer lives? It is a common complaint that there are no seasons in the American foodway. Fuji apples are stored in cold warehouses in Japan […]
Lacy, blossomed, branching, glowing in neon pink, green, yellow, purple, or orange—coral is a bouquet strewn on the sea floor. Who dives for fish when you can dive to be hypnotized by such beauty? Had I the courage to carry my breath in a tank, I would hang underwater for hours, trying to […]
“Cereal?” I ask, monosyllabic in the early morning. Andrew shakes his head. “Yom Kippur.” Oh. He is fasting. He goes about it so quietly that the Day of Atonement always sneaks up on me, the shiksa. I used to fast, I think a little defensively. I was so scrupulous, for a time there, […]
“You should write about pumpkin spice,” a friend urged. “I’d rather shoot myself.” I used to like pumpkin spices (note the plural, distinguishing the time-honored spice-rack cluster of nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and allspice). Then Starschmucks made a 390-calorie latte with flavored syrup and people lost their minds. We no longer have […]
For anyone who adores the fall season, there is something of a child’s disappointment at Christmas delayed when, after months of brutal heat and humidity, the first week of October lands in temperatures near the high 80s. There are few if any, golden and amber-red leaves for nature to unwrap on […]
Herbie Hancock tells a story about how he played a wrong chord once onstage with Miles Davis, King of Cool, in Stuttgart in 1963. It was a horror to Hancock; he put his hands on his ears, froze, and could not play another note for a full minute. Worse, he had already […]
In a recent New York Times column, fashion editor Vanessa Friedman fielded a nervous question about whether older women could wear vintage. “Whatever clothes you remember from your own youth will look different through the lens of now,” she pointed out. “You have changed over the years, as has your body. What may […]
Reading the news these days is hard. I open last week’s issue of The Week and learn that “forever chemicals”—human-made PFAS that keep our eggs from sticking to the pan, our hiking clothes from getting soggy, and our floss gliding between our teeth—will cost billions to remove from the planet. PFAS can take […]