A Sunday morning, and the city streets are still half asleep, lulled by the breeze. I am walking with a friend in a neighborhood new to me. An older woman calls good morning from her porch, where she has settled with a cigarette, vice on the Lord’s Day. She looks…
I had a busy morning but by 1:00 was in Seoul Taco on Delmar with the communists. Their social media said they were organized to aid The People of St Louis, a nice sentiment, but I was interested because they said in a post that they had realized that the…
“Coffee, Brown” Our morning habits, For Each of us, A pot brews Poured over, Estranged ~a contribution by Andy, in the comments section In his New York Times column, Judge John Hodgman fielded an intensely controversial question a few weeks ago, and…
A few weeks ago, the Sunday New York Times crossword was printed with an error. Mistakes had been made before, but in eighty-four years of cruciform puzzles, this was the first all-out disaster. The error meant that the clues and squares did not line up; the puzzle could not be…
Not since Prohibition has there been such a strong and widespread public warning. It feels a little odd.
I have begun what the Swedes call death cleaning. Well in advance, one hopes. But we have a big old house chock full of stuff, and I feel the need to lighten; besides, it is fun now, and will be less so if I wait until death is closer at…
“Ach! Don’t do that!” The dog dropped his paw, dismayed by my sharp tone. For years he has swiped my arm to get my attention, wangle a treat, stop me from overwork. Now—seemingly overnight, right after my sixty-fifth birthday—my skin has thinned to tissue paper, and his toenails cause blotches…
A brush-up on the toy company’s history points to one simple corporate marketing decision on which this strange trend in crime rests: the death of child’s play, and the rise of adult hobby obsession.
“Honey, you look sick without it,” my mom informed teenage me. Gentle and loving, she was hardly ever that harsh. But she was caught in the cult of femininity, and she wanted to make damned sure her daughter understood the need for artifice. I would like to say I ignored…
The impulse is to think that someone who makes plans for something else also helps bring it about. That fantasy does not seem to be doing us much good as a body politic, but the idea has taken root everywhere, including at Department of State.