Chef Anthony Bourdain gets to travel the globe and delight his senses in foreign cuisine. Lawyers get to geek out too, especially when travelling beyond familiar Western confines. Although perhaps not as boundary-pushing as eating warthog anus, there is joy in spotting counterfeits, fakes and, ahem, the borrowing of IP that would never fly in the United States.

Most legal advice articles remain terribly vague and overly technical. But that’s because the truly juicy stuff — where lawyers see lines actually drawn — typically ends up in settlement documents with confidentiality clauses. …

Recently the Vatican received a 1,200 page dossier outing nearly 40 priests in Italy who had connections with a male escort. The escort said he wanted to expose the hypocrisy. The cardinal who forwarded the dossier said he wanted repentance for the “harm” done.

Let’s for a moment though imagine a more open policy. A policy where the Church allowed its staff to express the fullness of their homosexuality without resorting to back alleys and escorts. Naturally, an openly gay priest — let’s call him Father Fabulous, would bring a certain flair to the position. The trope practically writes itself.

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For a few hours in Hong Kong, I felt like an eight-year old child all over again. A law school friend had introduced me to her family there and the patriarch, a seventy-year old doctor, drove me around the city on the second day of the Chinese New Year.

“Here,” he said, as he rifled through a shopping bag the size of a lunch tote. It was filled to the brim with small red envelopes. “Since you’re not married, you still get lucky money.”

I smiled and accepted the red envelope with polite but genuine protest. After all, I had…

In our house growing up I shared a bathroom with three brothers. We also had the responsibility of cleaning it, which meant it was usually disgusting. In this way my parents unwittingly prepared us for collegiate lives in our fraternities, but that is a story for another day.

To wake up late meant a Hobbesian struggle for the shower. Someone banging on the door while the shampoo has barely lathered may not qualify as a true hardship. But who wants to live like that? I did not and consequently developed a habit of waking up exceptionally early to shower.

While…

To paraphrase David Bellos, in reading or watching historical works, we’re struck not just by what was meant to be conveyed, but what was so obvious at the time that it didn’t need to be said at all. I was reminded of this recently while watching Back to the Future. The JC Penny sign dominates the background as Doc introduces the time traveling DeLorean to Marty McFly.

The film does not try to explain a mall. Or why the cavernous, empty parking lot exists. In order to go on the adventure to a strange land, the hero must start at…

I was a good liberal and for some time, liberals dumped a lot of their umbrage on Walmart. Such dumping has often been deserved with stories like this and this and due to the company’s repeated fights against labor unions.

The good liberals I knew never shopped there and, instead, proudly flashed their Costco cards, or at least shopped at Target. That world order began to crumble slightly for everyone in the age of Amazon. And one summer, a few years ago, it crumbled entirely for me.

At the time I had parking almost two blocks from my loft. So…

Porn. Few words in our lexicon have grown so much in usage over recent years. I first knew of its expanded use in Ruin Porn. And then some realtor friends started talking about their perfectly staged listing as Real Estate Porn. Myself? I see stories like this, or this, or this or images like this and wonder why we don’t just have a page and call it Liberal Porn?

Writer’s Porn would, by its nature, be written. The uninitiated might imagine descriptions of pens, notepads or quills; or, perhaps, stories about bookstores and the publishing industry. But the knowing know…

Americans’ principal assets — their homes and retirements account — enjoy a bevy of preferred treatment and status under the law. The deduction for mortgage interest [1] now maintains the position of a sacred cow. [2] A principal residence also enjoys significant protection from creditors. [3] Wall Street is a beneficiary of numerous laws that have given our common lexicon an alphabet soup-like litany of accounts: the IRA, the 401K, the 529, the 403(b), the SEP-IRA and so on. [4] All of these offer some tax benefit for the individual opening the account and perhaps even significant creditor protections. [5]

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