Archive

My Identity is Maybe a Little Tied Up In a Stupendous Overcoat

And I Feel Fine!

How to Make Egg Noodles

First, you’re going to need two cups of flour and three eggs. Semolina flour is better; if the flour you use is too coarse, your pasta dough will be noticeably textured, and not a in a good way; there will be shame in every bite. So use a fine-ground

Bittersweet

Someone once told me that the opposite of heartbreak is gratitude. I think they meant that you can lessen a burden of sadness by remembering the good things in your life, which is true. The thing they actually said isn’t. In my post for last Thanksgiving, I attacked a

Hi There

Hello everyone. I'm typing directly into the Ghost draft editor today, which means we don't get curly quotes or apostrophes. I'm sorry about that, but not sorry enough to copy-paste my way out of the situation. One of my favorite elements shared among the

Even a Crush is Something

There is something noble in the most pathetic forms of love. For it’s very pathetic to love someone you don’t know—to really love them, hook, line and sinker—to be ready to throw up everything, for someone whose middle name you don’t even know. We’ll

Simmering Anxieties

Being able to cook—wow—that caries high social status. So my thoughts must have been whispering to me all throughout childhood, because that’s the idea I grew up with, although no adult ever tried to drill it into me. My mom watched cooking shows sometimes. Perhaps it came

Cold

When I was young, it was warmer. One-hundred and six, one-hundred and five, one-hundred and nine—the whole twelve-day forecast went on like that in the summers. They said you could cook an egg on a car dash. My parents never let me try that. Still, they did stretch and

Dressing Well

And How to Define It

Plomp, Plomp, Plomp

There's a cricket on the sidewalk. And there's a toad. Plomp—the weigh of the toad slaps the sidewalk; a dreadful boggy sound that must rattle the exoskeleton of the cricket. It twitches an antenna. Plomp, goes the toad, and the bug is in real danger.

Emotion Review – Limbic Rage

There is an anger that you nurse and tend, and which makes you feel wretched and powerful. This is not that anger. This is something that comes on you like an attack from behind. It makes you feel wretched, but it makes you feel weak; not because you lack the

The Beast in the Bed

A Real-Life Tale of Home-Invasion

Keeping Christmas

The time for Christmas is now!

Subway Talk

Trapped in a subway with the king of hot takes

They Have a Good Thing Going

A review of the filmed Merrily We Roll Along.

He Was the Real Thing

I have only known Tom Stoppard in a small way, through reading his plays, which I’ve never even seen performed. And yet, when I saw the retrospectives and obituaries last week, I felt that a pillar had been knocked out of our cultural temple as English speakers. Stoppard was

Emotion Review - Unrequited Love

Imagine that you’ve been eating bland food all your life and suddenly you discover salt. It’s a revolution. The miraculous little mineral makes everything it touches better. How did you ever live without it? But imagine that this particular salt you’ve discovered triggers a craving. You put

Gratitude

A Sermon

The High-School Essay Problem

There’s a problem that crops up for the argumentative writer which I call “the high-school essay problem.” In high school, you’re taught—I was, at least—to stake out, early in your essay, a clear thesis. A claim you’ll go to bat for, a hill you’ll

Missing

You and I go back a long ways, back to kitchen counter conversations and air-conditioned afternoons. I paced the tile floors and sucked a spoon of peanut butter, you pounded water and leaned against the cabinets. We were young in those days, sure of ourselves. We had everything in the

I Saw Masquerade

And I liked it even better than Ariel's Undersea Adventure