A few years ago, I wrote what might still be my favorite post. It was about the history of pockets, and it’s my favorite because for once, the conclusion came easy and neatly. Too neatly and pop-historically, to be sure — but I’ll stand by it. Here it is, so you don’t have to click and […]
Friday night I walked through the Soho – Chinatown border, where continuous leans in structural black smoked cigarettes and lounged on restaurant benches next to vibrant old Asian women selling branches of longan, dragon’s eyes, and grapes the size of toddler fists. Fall is coming. My son’s last first season, and my own, in this […]
The best thing about marathon training — and long runs, generally — is that distance becomes a feature instead of a deterrent. And with that distance, comes the thrill of chance discovery. I run the same general outline but at some point the lights or a thickety glimpse propel me one or two or ten […]
The air Tuesday morning was like a hot towel, eighty and climbing at 6:30, when I took the dog and the baby on our neighborhood loop. By mid-afternoon, when I returned to our apartment with two bags full of the random and banal and occasionally poignant accumulations of office life, the bruise in the sky […]
Well those are four words I never expected to string together, and certainly not in an homage to this city. (More homages here and here.) I’ve realized that many of the parts of New York I love most are the ones that make it feel small and knowable. I don’t know if it’s the unexpectedness […]
Reality was the theme of English class my junior year of high school. Organic reality versus manufactured reality versus hyperreality. Is something real because you’ve experienced it? Because it looks/feels/smells/tastes just like that other thing, the one you know is real? Is it real because the New York Times said so? Because Brietbart said so? […]
I just finished Rachel Cusk’s Outline, and I’m thinking, again, about motherhood. Or rather, the role of the mother. Or rather, roles. The roles of Outline’s narrator include: mother, ex-wife, writer. It is in that last capacity that she, an Englishwoman, has come to Athens, to spend a few weeks teaching a writing class, in […]
