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 […]
Kamala Harris’s concession speech was, pundits on both sides agreed, “graceful.” The compliment is a tad gendered; men are seldom described as graceful, though they certainly can be. But brush that aside, because this country stands in desperate need of grace. And that holds true across all of the word’s possible definitions: forgiveness, […]
The tension in our usually placid household has been ratcheting up for days now. My stomach is tight; my husband’s blood sugar keeps spiking. We read each other the latest political outrage and talk nervously about the unrest we fully expect. What will happen in our sweet little town, a place where the majority […]
Thoughts are pricy these days; a penny will only buy ambivalence. Should our nation’s tiniest coin be preserved or officially abandoned? It has shaped our figurative language, our notions of thrift, our attitudes toward money. Yet we are a practical people, and it costs well over one cent to mint a […]
The other day I interviewed a woman who had been evicted—after being laid off from work in the aftermath of the 2008 recession and receiving a cancer diagnosis two days later, newly uninsured. She lost all her savings because not even McDonalds would hire her (too skilled, might leave soon). She said many […]
