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Why Pink Is So Complicated

    Growing up, I shunned anything shaped like a heart, anything ruffled or bedazzled, anything pink. In the first two instances, my antipathy holds—unless the heart holds Godiva chocolates. But my own heart does a secret leap, like a kid embarrassed to love ballet and practicing in an empty room, whenever I find myself […]

The Headband Makes a Comeback

    Awful, that I had forgotten all about Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, wife of John F. Kennedy Jr. and killed alongside him in that horrific plane crash. She was thirty-three years old. Also stunning, and a former publicist for Calvin Klein. Now I read that in one of fashion’s weird spirals, she has become, posthumously, a […]

The Age of Subtraction

      When Stephen Sondheim flew into town to accept the St. Louis Literary Award, my friend Lana Pepper, then president of the organization bestowing the prize, planned a dinner for him. Upon learning that Sondheim only drank vodka, Lana, the quintessential host, drove all over town in a frenzy, because the only vodka […]

The Mouse That…Squeaked

    It starts with a scritching noise that, like a demonic possession, seems to be coming from inside the walls. Then, anticlimax: we find a scattering of dark brown droppings in the bathroom cabinet. We are only dealing with Satan’s small gray minions. Andrew picks up a shredded pile of white cotton: “What’s this?” […]

Language Can Stop Us from Loving the World

    A quarter-century ago, Wendell Berry suggested that if we aim to rescue our planet, “we are using the wrong language.” Our terms are scientific, expert, analytical—but also cold, and often vague. “As a result we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to ‘save’ a world which their language simultaneously […]