• The Times Style section discovers reproduction vintage clothes. “Many devotees of reproduction vintage clothing said ‘Mad Men,’ the AMC television show set in the 1960s, as well as movie classics like ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Rear Window,’ had kindled their interest in fashions of the past. Says Becky Biesiada, 34, a day care provider and student in Muskegon, Mich., ‘To be a woman in today’s world and stand out, I feel it requires some of the charm from the past.‘” Interesting: These retailers report that their sales have been up 25 to 30 percent annually over the last four years, contrary to industry trends.

• In the Financial Times, Adam Haslett dares to question the authority of Strunk and White:

Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for “vigour” and “toughness” in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the cold war. A time before race riots, feminism and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair. This, of course, is part of its continuing appeal. It is spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists.

• “Roller-skating may never become as popular as it was, yet Mr. Costa and others say they have seen more customers lately. And nostalgia seems to be a driving factor.”

• Here’s perhaps an unnecessarily long article about parents who don’t hesitate to throw out most of their childrens’ early artwork. “Ultimately, when parents save the treasures of their little artists, they are stocking a hope chest of the imagination. In less poetic terms, someday Mom and Dad will try to give the junk back.”

• Related: The Times recommends an expensive portrait session for your beloved objects before they hit the trash. “It seems everyone I talk to has something from a trip or a family member that’s meaningful to them,” [the photographer] said. “But they don’t know how to showcase it, so it’s stuck in a closet or drawer. This is a modern way to preserve that memory.”

• Emma Straub writes on The Paris Review’s blog about the indelible Rayanne Graff of My So-Called Life, a show I feel as passionately about now as I did when it first aired.

Just as every person is the central figure in their own tale, I’m sure that all my Rayannes had Rayannes of their own—earlier versions of the bad girls they would become, all of us mirror images of one another in our dark lipstick and waffle tees….My first high-school Rayanne, from whom I learned to inhale, wasn’t a virgin, and when she was drunk, her Southern accent got stronger. When she was bleaching my hair in her bathtub, we laughed so hard and so loud that her younger sister told us we needed hysterectomies. I had never been happier, more fully in love with the very moment that I was living, even with a head that smelled like ammonia.

There’s also the uncomfortable experience of “having to watch Claire Danes age into a sinewy ballerina of a woman, her even skin and taut limbs offering no proof that she was ever a teenager at all. It’s like watching a dear friend—your sister, a twin—wear a diamond ring the size of a lighthouse, move to the suburbs, and vanish forever.”

• The demise of OTB prompts the Wall Street Journal to ask the timeless question, “As Edgy NYC Disappears, Does Its Character Go Too?“

• In the Guardian, Laura Miller looks at how fiction writers deal (or avoid dealing with) specific technology references in their work, and what this has to do with literary “timelessness”:

Writing historical fiction is the easiest way to escape the Now; to avoid dealing with the internet, you only have to step back a decade or two. If you’d prefer to write about characters entirely innocent of TV, you’d need to retreat as far as the 1940s; then you get the second world war and the Holocaust, subjects that, despite their historical specificity, are understood by everyone to be unimpeachably Timeless.

• The Pew Research Center looks at gadget-ownership by generation. Guess what? “Millennials are by far the most likely group not only to own most of the devices we asked about, but also to take advantage of a wider range of functions.”

• Thank you, Regis Philbin: Slate looks at who else should really just retire already.

• At The Millions, Lydia Kiesling writes about Beverly Cleary’s two memoirs, reminding me that I’m pretty sure I read A Girl from Yamhill during my years of Cleary obsession (which included writing her a multi-page starry-eyed fan letter that I was unable to send because I was chewing so intently on my pen that it burst and bled green ink all over the whole thing).

• Meghan Daum sings the (familiar) praises of snail mail. “[A]s the Postal Service continues its slow fade into history, something will be missing. Not written communication — indeed, it’s only multiplying — but the small comforts that come from waiting for it, handling it and smiling whenever you pass the table you’ve placed it on. For that, nothing beats the U.S. mail.” So does Walter Kirn, for whom the ye olde post office is the post American thing there is.

• I was struck by this line from Libby Copeland’s Slate article about how Facebook is making us feel lonelier: “Happiness is impersonal in a way that pain is not.”