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 […]
Grinning, I requested Want, Gillian Anderson’s collection of women’s anonymous sexual fantasies, from our all-knowing small-town library. Why not? If a few were especially intriguing, I could read them aloud to my husband in a husky voice…. He saw the book on the kitchen table and snuck it away the next time he […]
I recognize the email address; this guy has written to me periodically over the years, either to share outrage over some social injustice, add a little insight, or offer warm concern. Now, for the first time, he is the one in trouble: he says he is about to be evicted […]
I am fussing over the slavering contributions to Trump’s inaugural fund—especially the millions forked over by CEOs who are unlikely, in the privacy of their suites, to even deem him presidential. “Is everything pay-to-play now?” I exclaim. The silence of the newspaper that broke Watergate can now be bought, and the giants of […]
In A French Village, when her son is killed by a German bomb, a man tells the keening mother to “Be dignified.” I would slap him, but instead she pulls herself together. In a later episode, a young woman is fired from her job as a maid because she is Jewish. She turns […]
If you asked me, I would say I am not a perfectionist. I know this because I am so painfully aware of how many times I screw up or fall short, and how much is always left to do…. Oliver Burkeman does not share my denial, but he does share my compulsions—to do […]
Weeks ago, the sweet family across the street put up their festive holiday lights. The house on the corner followed, then three more houses, all before I had even managed to order a Thanksgiving turkey. I curse the lights. Typically American, I mutter, meaning of course U.S. American, where we are so arrogant […]
The three-martini lunch, once standard, turned scandalous in the seventies, hastily replaced by light beer and wine coolers. Then came a defiant resurgence of glam cocktails and cigar bars, followed by a wave of sober-curious shaming, and then the triumphant redemption of red wine as healthful. Which was followed—while the applause still roared—by […]
When I edited a city magazine, a smartass friend suggested a department called Why So Ugly? There would be no shortage of examples from the built environment. Big boxes, glass towers, strip malls—it is as though a child drew these shapes, then crafted them from whatever cheap stuff was close at hand and […]
I used to read about regimes in other countries where anything unfavorable to those in power was erased, burned, rewritten. The Chinese Communist Party, which pronounced any negative events or criticism “historical nihilism.” Joseph Stalin, who rewrote Russian history before he began his purges. Afghanistan, which plucked forty years of the country’s life […]
