A story on MSNBC yesterday asked, Has the college sendoff always been so tough? Alongside the piece is a video from the Today show, subtitled, “As NBC’s Kevin Klein reports, when it comes time to say goodbye on campus, it’s the parents who’ve got issues.” I’ve noticed an abundance of these stories lately — including […]
Politics & Society
Toy Story 3: ‘Contains Mild Thematic Elements Not Appropriate for Older Viewers’
Dear Motion Picture Association of America: I’m freshly back from the theater after seeing Toy Story 3. One question: A G-rating? What were you thinking? I haven’t been this disturbed since the Turkish prison scenes in Midnight Express. The first two Toy Story movies centered on the happy relationship between a young boy named Andy […]
Today’s Guessing Game: What Is It?
Remember AOL disks? If you owned a mailbox in the late 1990s or early-2000s, you know what I mean, because America Online‘s aggressive direct mail strategy probably distributed CD-ROMs and diskettes into it with irritating frequency. More than a billion disks were mailed between the late 1990s and 2006, when AOL stopped the mass mailing. […]
Scavenged
We set off on foot, the six of us, under an azure sky as big as the ocean. The breeze off the water smelled of salt and September, and the dune grasses bent toward each other, whispering the news that fall was coming. It was a picture-perfect, precious August day, the kind of day that […]
Lucky
The Boston outlet of Morton’s, a Chicago-based steakhouse chain, sits across the street from Boston Harbor in a newly developed part of town called the Seaport. Inside, Morton’s has a clubby feel—all hushed tones and white linen and dark paneling. The bad lighting makes it hard to read the prices, which are high, so perhaps […]
Awkward Family Photos
As I sometimes reveal here, there is something universal about the awkwardness of family. About a week ago, two childhood friends launched a site to document as much. The results — in the vein of LOLCats and Stuff White People Like — are hilarious: The Choker: “This is what happens when your male role model […]
10 Things I Hate About You, Travel Edition
The flight from Boston to Los Angeles takes six hours, during which there is a kind of caricature of intimacy that develops, at least in Coach. You might not even know the name of the guy sitting at your elbow, but still: You know his choice of reading material; what he drinks with his meal; […]
A Journey to ’25 Random Things’
Three weeks ago, William tagged me in a “25 Random Things About Me” chain letter. I’ve hung around with William a few times, but reading his list feels a lot like a peek at his diary: Here are his hopes, fears, and his profession of love for Twizzlers. I’m tagged again by Tim (“I’m a […]
‘What Happened to Your Nose?’
It’s usually children and foreigners who ask: those who have no sense of propriety or privacy, or those who consider Westerners too uptight about all the wrong things, and, paradoxically, not uptight enough about others. The waiter at the Indian restaurant sympathetically gestures toward his own, toast-colored nose and inquires in heavily accented English, “Oooh… […]