Love, Lust, and Liberty, by the Hour

It’s an innocuous redbrick building, wedged snugly into the triangle formed by West Fourteenth Street, Tenth Avenue, and the West Side Highway. It could be some kind of government office, a place where you’d go to get your driver’s license renewed or apply for the…

Death and the Suburbs

When visiting home becomes a meditation on mortality

My mother’s friend died last night. Mrs. C. had a brain tumor, and her descent was brutally rapid. She got her diagnosis in the spring, right around the same time my parents’…

For Paul, With Lox and Squalor

He sold me salmon, and became my friend

I’m leaving New York this week. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but I do know that there is no Russ & Daughters where I’m going, and there is no Paul.

Autoneurotic

When you’re an awkward teenage girl, beware strange men in passing cars

On a weekend afternoon not long ago, I was walking home down a narrow side street that was backed up with cars waiting for the light to change. Without giving…

No Country for Old Milk

When cleaning out your kitchen gets personal

I’ve almost made it through the teff flour. That went into a recipe for peanut-butter cookies that I found printed on the side of its bag. The oat, brown-rice, quinoa, and buckwheat…

Sweat and the City

This past weekend, I watched a number of my neighbors pack things — coolers, oars, inflatable toys, children — into their family-sized vehicles and drive off towards the promise of an extended Fourth of July vacation. If the traffic constipating the streets of Lower Manhattan was any…

Neither Here Nor There

When highway law enforcement gets existential 

West of Salt Lake City, Utah, seventeen hundred miles into my drive from Michigan to San Francisco, I was pulled over by a cop. I’d first encountered him a few minutes earlier; his…

Even on Twitter, your movie-star crush still doesn’t love you

John Travolta was technically my first movie-star crush, thanks to a brief fascination with Grease when I was six. But he was quickly forgotten the night Star Wars came on TV and I watched Harrison Ford curl his upper lip…

Dig in, Girls

The pie’s consumption was unplanned. Louise and I were sitting in the kitchen of our student flat, picking idly at homework and staring out the window at the wrinkly hills of the Edinburgh skyline. At some point, we realized we were hungry. We turned to survey the counter, which held a half-eaten tin of…

The Tie That Bynes

First disclaimer: I love a celebrity train wreck as much as the next depraved, procrastination-inclined American. The pictures on the cover of US Weekly have the same effect on me as bright, shiny colors do on magpies and small children; they compel me more often than I’d like to admit to…