By the time I publish this post, New York will probably be out of this heat wave, but right now we are in it. The air above the sidewalks shimmers, and the sidewalks have quasi-emptied out. The oldtimers who peddle the wares they find from newercomers’ discard piles have retreated into their favorite bodega; the […]
I’ve been re-re-reading Adam Gopnik’s wonderful memoirs of life as an expat and young father in Paris at the turn of the past century. Oh, the Clinton years (said as a person who experienced them as a child), when America and its capitalist forces were viewed as, ultimately, unstoppable and logical, if a bit gauche. […]
The light, at 6:07, has gone opal, where just last week it was oyster and the week before that, a furry, caterpillar grey. I don’t know if my son notices the difference; he is up at 6, or 6:05, or 6:17 regardless of pitch. Only when it rains does he sleep longer. We all do. […]
A number of threads have been floating around my head of late, and I don’t know whether I’m forcing something by connecting them, but here goes. When I worked in the entertainment division of Conde Nast, the walls of our floor were adorned in machismo inspirational quotes. “Don’t half-ass two things; whole ass one thing” […]
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 […]
