To a Text Message, on its 20th Birthday
The text message is a real grownup now, turning 20 years old on this very day. How can it be?!
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What sort of dining experience is the right sort of dining experience for the diner who's seen it all, done it all, eaten it all, and is just so weary over simply sitting in a nice restaurant and eating? Dinner while hanging from a rope, for $500 each, for the pleasure of dining really, really alfresco.
The text message is a real grownup now, turning 20 years old on this very day. How can it be?!
It's pretty fantastic, this picture from the Kennedy Center Honors Gala dinner at the State Department last night: Meryl and Hillary are an itsy-teeny bit just like us!
What does age mean when the contraints of being old are evolving every day? It means it's getting better all the time.
What happens when one NYU student replies to 39,978 others? Things go nuts, on TV, the Internet, and the world, and so on. Now it's transitioned into a handy anecdote on the state of how to use email.
In this week's Y.A. for Grownups column I'm paying special homage to the oft under-applauded but always important art of the books; specifically, the cover art that's appeared on books published for teens and middle-grade audiences this year.
In this week's Thursday Style section, the New York Times presents a terrifying conundrum for the world in which we live: Is the dinner party, that elegant trademark of yore, in its final throes?
In his Salon piece, "I was a male spinster," Tim Gihring speaks to a feeling common to men and women of a certain age who haven't yet seen fit to do the proposal-and-ring thing in the time expected of them.
Parents are paying tutors to do their precious offspring's work for them! Clearly, this is against the rules. But it's happening anyway.
The nearly 80-year-old "petite poly-hyphenate" has stayed busy, doing talk shows and benefits and fund-raisers, awarding her Peace Price to the members of Pussy Riot, and more. She is also designing men's wear for Opening Ceremony, which... well, see for yourself.
In a shocking disclosure revealed by Alison Flood in the Guardian this week, the most venerable of dictionaries, the Oxford English, may be embroiled in quite the scandal. Or is it?
Discriminating boozehounds are [figuratively] battling it out at the great cornucopia of booze (i.e., liquor stores) for the last remaining bottles of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon in New York City.
Thursday's lunch, between a couple of men who didn't seem terribly keen on each other just a few weeks ago, brings up a host of modern-day etiquette questions. Here, we do our best to answer them.
The Washington Post today allowed our female anchor class to become some harbinger of a gender-equal clothing trend (except not quite), and that does the whole topic a disservice.
There is something worrisome going on online, and the recent Chris Brown/Jenny Johnson nastiness isn't the half of it.
Let's take a minute to get Grammar-Real: It has come to my attention of late that many of us are using hyphens wrong. This is not, of course, the hyphen's fault.
If you have a case of the Cyber Mondays, you're probably asking yourself, "How do we stop the Cyber Train?" It is simple. Refuse to partake! Next week, try these instead.
There are as many "types" of hipsters as there are unique and beautiful-in-their-way Tupperware containers, and some of those hipsters are inspired by Martha Stewart. Martha Stewart?!
As the New York Times public editor looks back on Pete Wells, Guy Fieri, and "exuberant pans," we've come to see that negative reviews are now just way more meta, and way more democratic, than ever.
So, it's Thanksgiving. What in the world are you going to talk about with your aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, parents, grandparents, and relative strangers? We've collected some of the most helpful packages, anecdotes, and news entries from around the Internet.
A Park Slope dive bar is threatening to secede from the neighborhood that, it feels, fails to appreciate its dive-y charm. What would we do, though, if all of the dive bars left us? The world would be bleak, indeed.
Dictionary.com has announced bluster as its 2012 Word of the Year. Yet we don't feel blustery. We dug in to find out what, exactly, makes a "word of the year." And, of course, included some WOTY suggestions of our own.
Are you feeling ... dare we say it ... not so festive? Look, we understand. It's been a rough month! What is there to give thanks for? There are things! Here are a few.
Gone are the days when you'd ask that nice neighborhood guy or gal to come over and watch the kiddos for a few hours while you jetted off to do errands and get your hair done.
There's a new smell out there, folks. Well, the smell has existed before now, as smells do, but finally it has a way to make itself known in words. This smell has been dubbed "olfactory white" by scientists, writes Stephanie Pappas of LiveScience, "because it is the nasal equivalent of white noise."
In 1953, Mad Libs was born when Leonard Stern was struggling to come up with the perfect adjective to describe Ralph Kramden's new boss's nose. Nearly 60 years later, Price Stern Sloan is a Penguin imprint, and Mad Libs are still being written and published on a regular basis—maybe more than ever.
Simon & Schuster is holding a jacket-design contest in honor of the Ray Bradbury novel. Here are a few of our favorites so far.
Christy Wampole's Opinionator piece in the Sunday New York Times, "How to Live Without Irony," has a lot of people talking, ironically or otherwise.
The final movie in the Twilight series is out this week, and the eldest of the four books is now going on 7 years old. My how they grow up fast! What has the equally maligned and adored—yet, either way, incredibly successful—series left us? And what might be next in hyper-popular Y.A.?
Justin Peters is my hero. Or, whomever came up with the idea to make Justin Peters try to live as many New York Times Styles section trend stories as possible—wearing a man bun, speaking in Britishisms, getting a bikini wax, blacking out a tooth to imitate a gap—that person is really my hero.
Enough people are working from home in their beds (and, no, this is not a sex scandal thing) that Sue Shellenbarger has addressed it in a piece in The Wall Street Journal. "Is clacking away on a laptop while sprawling on bed sheets more comfortable and productive than hunching over a desk?" she asks. Of course it is! Right?
You could call it "an embarrassment," or "amusing," a "soap opera," a "four-star farce," or "the most dramatic rose ceremony yet." You could call it, as Paula Broadwell did (for her book), All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. You could call it a conspiracy, or just like high school. But you're going to have to call it something.
Along with Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons and Matt Groening's Life in Hell series, which of course pre-dates The Simpsons, there is a special place reserved in my heart for Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, syndicated from November 18, 1985, to December 31, 1995, and the books that compiled them.
There's a bookish love letter from writer Lois Leveen in The New York Times this week. It is an ode to her adored thesaurus, or, as she titles it, "the king of writerly tools."
Information continues to emerge in the increasingly complicated, increasingly tawdry, and entirely all-consuming news story of what at first seemed like a "relatively" simple affair between former CIA head David Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell. But let's pause for a moment and talk about one very special sentence in the affair.
Monday through Friday, Details editor in chief Dan Peres commutes to work with The New York Times and home with The New York Post, and considers it a luxury that he can benefit from the media consumption of others.
The "secession movement" on the White House open petition site now involves about half of the states of the U.S., which could be interpreted to mean we have more in common than we purport to, after all. Who wants it the most?
If you were to choose the word of the year, the year being 2012, what would you pick? Trust this will be a matter of much enjoyably conflict-filled discussion as we gear up for end of the year word lists.
As many of us transition back to our sort-of normal post-hurricane lives, there is reflection upon what we learned, not just about natural disasters and helping others in a time of need, but also about hurricane weight gain and ... hurricane love.
"At the C.I.A., [adultery] can be a security issue, since it can make an intelligence officer vulnerable to blackmail, but it is not a crime," write Scott Shane and Charlie Savage in the New York Times. Adultery can also sell books, particularly when the book is a gushingly reverential ode to the subject with whom the writer is said to be having an affair.
As weather gets weirder (yes, Sandy. Yes, a nor'easter in November), here are a few of the Y.A. and middle-grade books we've relied on in the past for guidance and clarity when our environment appears to go off the rails.
Both the New York Post and the Daily News grudgingly put our latest storm—the one that brought 4.7 inches of snow to Central Park last night—on their front pages, and there's indeed a lot of actual snow all over the streets of New York, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Brrr-Grrr.
It's been more than a week since Sandy hit the New York area, and with an intervening election and, now, snow on the ground, to some it may be a faded memory, enough so we can start talking about how hilarious and interesting it all was, the funny things it made us do, the compromises we had to make, and how much weight we gained from the whole event. Right?
Athena is the name of the winter storm that is currently bringing slushiness to the Northeast. This new storm-lady has gotten some attention in the aftermath of Sandy, given Sandy's altogether extensive nastiness and damage left behind.
Did the 2012 election change America? Or has America been changing all along, with our votes simply a way of registering that fact?
We know you're waiting to vote, among other bits and pieces of waiting. But as you're waiting in reportedly long lines, what exactly are you muttering in your mind, or tweeting to your followers, or posting on your Facebook page, or texting to your friends? On or in?
The nor'easter is still on the way. The good news, from Weather.com, "It won't be another Sandy." The bad news: "On Wednesday, it will add misery to Sandy-battered areas with strong winds, heavy rain, rough surf, and very chilly temperatures."
Does this sound at all like you, or someone you know (asking for a friend)?: You woke up this morning and you realized, Oh crap, it's the election.
Whether you've been waiting for four years, since the last election, to cast your ballots in another, or for just days or weeks or months, you can't have failed to become in some way swept up as a news reader in the undulating rhythms of politics in some way or another. Waiting! Waiting is the worst.
The "forgotten borough" of Staten Island was hard hit by Sandy, sustaining extensive damages and accounting for nearly half the death toll in the area. It remains in need of a lot of help.
As we mentioned last week there's another storm headed our way. Though it's going to be nowhere near as damaging as Sandy—as we wrote then, don't freak—there's an added problem with this storm, which is going to bring cold air and rain, heavy gusts of wind, and possible snow to the Northeast.
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