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.
A fiery debate rousing the Internet today is the one over hugs. You may not have known this, but hugs can be divisive. There are, of course, as many types of huggers as there are types of humans. Read on for a few Hug Types you might find familiar.
Here's a warning: That food festival you're hell-bent on attending might be terrible. It might, on the other hand, be an utterly delicious frolic. All this really depends on you.
Oversharing is widely deplored and highly criticized, and those who commit the crime are often themselves considered affronts to good taste. Maybe they can't help it. Also, couldn't it be worse? Beware the undershare!
You've heard of the book. You've heard of the major motion picture. But what's in a name, when the name is Gatsby? An investigation into the popularization of a word that is only sort of a word.
People have tattoos. The New York Times has noticed! But a lot of people are still hiding their tattoos, even though they got them and they like them. This is because of the office.
One long-held taboo of office life is that you're not supposed to talk about what you make. It appears that may be changing.
A long, long, long time ago (like, last year) I wrote an obituary for the word artisanal. It seemed high time to declare it dead and get on with our lives. And yet, it has become clear in the months that have followed that artisanal is not dead. Artisanal may, instead, be undead.
The 212 area code is under attack! Those three little numbers may not be the perfect piece of Manhattan ownership you thought they were.
Is it a day of unrelenting pain, or 24 hours of pure delight? Are the naysayers missing the point, or are the pranksters to be condemned? We discuss, in another round of Cocktail Crossfire.
It may be the chorus most heard in these modern times: technology and the way we use it has killed etiquette entirely. (Thank you?). Fortunately, the good people at the New York Times have set to work debunking this theory. Etiquette is everywhere. Is it still etiquette, though?
Updates to dictionaries take place regularly enough that it seems like someone is always grumbling over this word or that phrase being included in the most esteemed place we think of words existing. But sometimes the lexicographers themselves are surprised by what they find.
Remember the old aphorism that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? It's not so pleasant when it happens to you! Or at least that seems to be the thinking of a lot of New York City chefs who've found themselves "ripped off," cuisine-wise.
You probably haven't thought much about staplers—or possibly even used one—unless you read The New York Times this weekend.
What are you doing tonight? Will you be breaking bread at a table at a fine dining establishment with 16 of your closest friends? Are you—horror of horrors—invited to a group dinner? Get out of it now; call in sick; leave the country. Run, run, far, far away, as fast as you can. Group dinners are the worst.
Slaughterhouse 90210 is that Tumblr you may have heard of, created and run by Maris Kreizman, who, four years ago, came up with the high-low brilliance of offering daily screengrabs from popular TV shows paired with literary quotes.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Books — staid and intellectual cultural artifacts that they so often are — were not all just staid or intellectual this year. Not nearly. There were, in fact, publishing scandals, dramas, and plot twists galore. Oh, and Philip Roth.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
We are firmly, if temporarily, ensconced in that weird, limbo-esque time that exists between Christmas and New Year's Eve. Here are some things to do while we wait for 2013.
Adult fiction and nonfiction were pretty phenomenal this year. Here, we celebrate 34 of our favorite reads from the last 12 months — with superlatives!
In a wave of irony, it is O.K. to do things one otherwise wouldn't. Right? Because you're being ironic. Meet the newest foodie trend of ironic dining, as inspired by Pete Wells' review of Guy Fieri's restaurant, and find out how to dine ironically for yourself!
Don't worry that you'll never see a date like this again: worry about these 12 things you absolutely need to do on the only opportunity you're going to have to do things on 12/12/12.
The pursuit of Zero Dark Inbox is a diligent movement to eliminate all unread messages, but what about the rest of us?
Many of us are cutting to the chase and simply buying gifts for ourselves this season, according to the market research. 'Tis the season for getting yourself a little something, apparently.
Slate's Katy Waldman has cast a cold, malevolent eye upon grapefruit this mid-winter morn and declared it "disgusting," a gift you should never give to anyone you care about. But surely there are worse gifts. Like these.
The New York Post's Sara Stewart reports that our mourning of the dinner party came too soon. It's not dead at all; it just changed locations, and its cast of roving characters.
What are we really doing when we're sitting in front of the TV laughing at yet another smackdown between the Real Housewives of Wherever? Sometimes it's simple, sometimes it's more complicated, and the truth of the matter is, it probably varies for each of us. We look at 10 shows.
The text message is a real grownup now, turning 20 years old on this very day. How can it be?!
What does age mean when the contraints of being old are evolving every day? It means it's getting better all the time.
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.
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.
There is something worrisome going on online, and the recent Chris Brown/Jenny Johnson nastiness isn't the half of it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This week's love lesson comes by way of the New York Post, where much ink has been dedicated to the relationship travails of Larry Greenfield, 47, a retired Long Island securities trader who has spent more than $65,000 on six different matchmaking services in 12 years.
New research says that even Facebook, where we use our real names and identities, makes us behave terribly. Is the Internet really making us so awful, or were we, perhaps, just bad to start with, and getting worse? We discuss.
Ah, what is a freelancer to do about love, given all the working from home alone in a state of barely dressed disarray he or she tends to do—meaning that said freelancer doesn't see anyone other than, maybe, a food delivery person or his or her own cat, on a regular basis? The answer is coffee.
There's a study in the news that's bound to get a bunch of people talking (Drudge tweeted it this morning, for instance, with more than 100 retweets). Whether those people are for or against its pronouncements, it seems to fly in the face of what we thought we knew about marriage, gender equality, and the way modern, successful relationships work.
We predicted this. Or, at least, we predicted the impending backlash to our nation's growing obsession with yogurt—Greek yogurt, specifically. Now there's a New York Post trend story on the subject. Backlash machine, activate!
Just when you thought maybe we'd stopped talking hipster to death as a term (haven't we killed it, already?) it rears its head again: This time in Forbes' gleeful list of "America's Hippest Hipster Neighborhoods."
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