i read it in the new york times
memory objects
My mom was in Toronto last month, dealing with the deeply sad task of figuring out which of my grandmother’s painstakingly assembled photo albums to keep intact. For most of her life, my grandmother put together an album after every trip she and my grandfather took (and there were many). She admitted that it was [...]
André Aciman writes beautifully about anticipating, and sometimes dreading, what he knows will come next in the life of his family:
[My son] liked rituals. I liked rehearsing. Rituals are when we wish to repeat what has already happened, rehearsals when we repeat what we fear might yet occur. Maybe the two are one and the [...]
As below, Haley Barbour’s dreamy nostalgia for pre-civil rights Mississippi is not “false nostalgia,” but it is a rather insidious false memory–the kind of misunderstanding of history that should probably bar one from becoming a serious presidential candidate, but probably won’t. (An editorial in the Times calls it “the faulty memory all too common among [...]
The last of the tomatoes are coming in now, wide and cracked, heavy with the captured humidity of passing summer, each one a Neruda poem shedding its own light, benign majesty. It is time to eat them, these sunsets of the season, then put away our flip-flops and face the fall.
Dear Sam Sifton: You are [...]
Today’s best headline: “‘Cougar’ Trend of Women Chasing Younger Men a Myth.”
You don’t say.
The glut of 90’s-centric fashion has finally led the Times to an obvious source of influence: Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes, wearing all those poufy floral patterned dresses, often paired with jackets and boots. Writer William Van Meter thinks her look incorporated a range of styles, including “early American settler, gypsy, business casual, pious [...]
So cool: Part of an 18th-century ship (“30-foot length of a wood-hulled vessel“) was found at the World Trade Center site, 20 to 30 feet below street level. “The vessel, presumably dating from the mid- to late 1700s, was evidently undisturbed more than 200 years.”
David W. Dunlap’s lede is totally over the top, but also [...]
I was reading the New Yorker on the subway the other day, and saw this ad. It took up a full page, and there was a full-color shot of Michael Phelps, dripping wet, on the facing page.
They’re really milking that swimming metaphor, huh? If anything, I’d say we “swim” in the Internet and “surf” magazines [...]
This weekend’s Times Magazine story about how people who lost their spouses in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake are now getting remarried to each other (with some help from the Chinese government), reminded me of this pretty amazing 2004 piece about NYC firefighters who left their wives for 9/11 widows.
on “date night”
A.O. Scott, how I love you:
[T]he word vagina has no intrinsically humorous properties, but it’s uttered here as if believing that it did were sufficient to make it so.