Despite the horror of it all, one of the most amusing stories of the day involves the public reaction to Britain's Royal Horticultural Society's decision to allow the presence of garden gnomes at this year's Chelsea Flower Show.
Since August of 2012 we've been predicting that people were going to unleash a world of hate against Greek yogurt. Perhaps—and this pains me to say it, but maybe it's true—perhaps we were wrong.
The 21-year-old star of The Descendants has been offered the lead in the film adaptation of the best-selling Y.A. novel by John Green — and he and his fans are pretty excited.
So, what's an old fogey to do about Spring Break? I enlisted the help of a few current (or recent, or once upon a time-ago) Spring Breakers to explain.
Roth turns 80 today, and we look back at his first book, which, in the words of Saul Bellow, is "not the work of a beginner."
Sometimes we consider the big day more important than the "entire life" together. Now, apparently, that thinking has pushed past the wedding itself. It's all about the proposal, too.
Goodnight, bittersweet season two of HBO's Girls. You gave us a lot to think about. And now, hope springs new again, because season three could really bring anything.
One thing we keep talking about when we talk about current-day-now feminism is who women are supposed to be. But isn't telling women to fit in one bucket and not some other one (and then judging them if they deviate from those expectations) rather anti-feminist in itself?
Last night brought us the season two finale of Girls, an episode with the unusually rom-com-esque title, "Together." It's been an interesting ride this season, full of discomfort and displeasure, cringing and awkwardness for characters and viewers alike, and this 30-minute season ender was no exception.
Gayle Forman's Just One Day is a love story mixed with a coming-of-age tale featuring the character of Allyson Healey. Allyson can be a little bit frustrating. What's a Y.A. author to do about that? We asked Gayle Forman, who created her.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Sunday's episode of Girls was about pain. Physical, mental, and emotional pain, and all three, together. And most of all, the pain of watching people in pain.
Grammar. In honor of its beauty and, more importantly, its usefulness to all of us, there is a National Grammar Day, a day that grammarians have been celebrating since 2008. How should a word-minded person celebrate?
"It's Back" is the title of last night's episode of Girls. It refers most obviously to the reappearance of Hannah's OCD. But it's a phrase that applies to nearly every major character on the show in some way or another.
If the act of rereading a book is partly about remembering the you who paged through it the first time, and comparing that version of yourself to the one who's reading the book again, the classics that we read in high school offer endless possibilities for rediscovery.
In a season of Girls which is growing increasingly more interesting and rewarding, last night's episode, "Video Games," shed light on perhaps the most mysterious character of the four ladies, Jessa (Jemima Kirke).
Why do people insist on spelling certain words with more letters than is necessary on an inherently limited social media platform like Twitter? I turned to Tyler Schnoebelen, a recent PhD from Stanford who studies emotion in language, in hopes of gaining some clarityyy.
Last night's episode of Girls was titled "Boys." True to its name, it gave us the opportunity to spend more time with Adam, Ray, and Booth Jonathan than we have in any other episode this season, and certainly more time than anyone should ever need to spend with Booth Jonathan.
The good news is, there's a sentiment for everyone. The bad news is, you might end up with the sentiment you don't want. Read on, lovelorn and love-satisfied friends, for the best and worst and most thought-provoking sentiments of Valentine's Day.
Who hasn't wanted to say forget it to the toils and troubles of daily life and instead move into a castle, or brownstone, with a handsome older person who can take care of us and maybe even save our lives?
What do Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, the ladies of the Baby-Sitters Club, Nancy Drew, and R.L. Stine’s various goosebumps-inducing cohort have in common? They were art for your childhood bookshelves, and also, now, art for your grownup walls.
After the complicated emotions last week's Girls inspired, episode four, "It's a Shame About Ray" — hark, a Lemonheads reference! — went a long way toward redeeming and refocusing the show.
Men are wearing meggings — primarily, it seems, so they can write articles about men wearing meggings. Is this an all-new low in stunt-journalism, or an unprecented high in male fashion? Are meggings even a thing? We investigate.
If art's great power is making the person who interacts with that art feel something, you could argue that HBO's Girls is highly successful television. But if a TV show consistently makes a watcher feel bad, can it be good?
On the occasion of the Jane Austen classic's anniversary, here's a selection of covers from years past up through the present — the good, the bad, the jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and a few that pale in comparison to the book's contents.
In his inaugural address, Barack Obama said repeatedly, "We, the people," those key and memorable initial words of the preamble to the Constitution, effectively moving us from 1776 to today.
Lena Dunham and company are far too skilled to simply deliver something that lands right on the nose, as nuanced as an after-school special. Right? Somewhere between parody and reality there is Girls.
In 1990, The Face on the Milk Carton was published by Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, introducing 15-year-old Janie Johnson to the world. This month, the final installment in the five-book series, Janie Face to Face, was released.
Michelle Obama's new bangs will not make an entire city fashionable, but there remains hope, amidst the inaugural-ball scramble, that other people can. Hope!
The misused word is everywhere, proliferating like fruit flies 'round a bowl of rotting bananas. We must stop it before it goes too far.
Pauline Phillips, the woman who founded the Dear Abby column in the 1950s, has died, but that doesn't mean her advice doesn't continue into perpetuity. In fact, it's woven — sometimes obviously, sometimes imperceptibly — into the fabric of our cultural lives.
Truth and the Internet are strange bedfellows these days, and it's much easier to lie to a large audience online than in person. Has social media made us more gullible? Or was it always this hard to tell distanced falsehood from human reality?
What if we all dated according to the "trends" spotted by the New York Post? 'Twould be an interesting relationship world indeed. And where would the paper itself fall in all of that?
What happens when people grow up and cease to use the crayons of their childhood creative pursuits and endeavors? Not to worry, there are crayons for adulthood, too!
Last night a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall proved what book publishing and his fans have long known about John Green: There's something deeply powerful about not only the popular Y.A. books he writes, but also about the man himself.
The editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review turns to his iPad after saying good morning to his wife, but the last thing he looks at before going to sleep is a hardcover book.
Here's the story of the unusual, sweet-and-sour conundrum that arises when an Olympic gold medalist returns to dominate the competition.
The author of The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, and Angels & Demons is at it again, filling the world with shadowy symbols and codes and not being very clear about anything. But if you don't figure it out in the end, don't worry: He'll tell you.
The newly crowned Miss America loves New York and lives in Brooklyn. But does that mean Brooklyn is in love with its new Miss America?
On a night in which the HBO show won two Golden Globes — Best Television Series and Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series for Lena Dunham — Girls was back with a season premiere. What happened?
We've all seen them, and maybe some of us have posted them. The passive aggressive break room note like, "If this yogurt isn't yours, don't eat it." "Whoever keeps leaving his or her dirty dish in the sink, your mom isn't here to wash it for you." And, of course, the age-old "If you sprinkle when you tinkle" missive, hung up in many a ladies' room.
The Rules, a dating instruction manual of yore by two ladies named Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider should, by now, have gone the way of the cave drawing or the horse and buggy, as a relic of times past. Instead it's been updated.
Well, what can we say about the new official portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge, just unveiled to the consternation of many?
This week in Y.A. for Grownups we chart a course through history by way of books new, old, and upcoming. For your reading convenience, we've categorized the books by historical period or event.
How are your clothes for meditation? Do you look hot in them? If not, uh oh. You're in trouble. One must dress for success, not just in the office, but in the gym, and in the yoga studio, and wherever you choose to meditate, for that matter.
It's the year 2013. Do we really need our store-bought food to be "made with love"? And can we believe it when it says it is?
In the wake of the sad news of the death of incredibly talented author and journalist Richard Ben Cramer comes an update on a story about the publishing industry at large.
There's a piece in the Wall Street Journal today about the changing nature of libraries, as not just places where people find and check out books, but as community rec centers in themselves. But is this really new at all?
It's shaping up to be a pretty big year for short stories, and for books from some notable, big-name authors who are returning with new fiction. Herewith, the list of the books we can't wait for.
In Sunday's New York Times there's an article that combines things relationship with things semantic. What in the world are you supposed to call the man or woman with whom you've been living with for the past 20 years — your de facto spouse — when you're not actually, officially married, and never want to be?
In a final vote of 118 to 99 in a runoff against marriage equality (winner of "Most Likely to Succeed"), at the annual Word of the Year event held by the American Dialect Society, hashtag took it home.
Tonight in the grand ballrooms of a Boston Marriott, linguists and language experts and word aficionados will gather to vote on the American Dialect Society's official Word of the Year. Will it be YOLO? Mansplaining? Fiscal cliff? Only time will tell, but for now ... a preview.
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