Because I walk quickly, while wearing sunglasses and headphones, I’m often stopped by tourists in Times Square who need directions. It’s as if my visible, unmistakable barriers to social interaction reveal me to be just the sort of New Yorker who can point you toward Crumbs. To be fair, part of me enjoys being the […]
Monthly Archives: April 2010
Ouch
From today’s book section of the New York Times: “Solar,” the new novel by Ian McEwan, is … a book so good—so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off—that it’s actually quite bad. Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it’s impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral. […]
Fine Print
There’s an excellent article by Cynthia Gorney in the New York Times on the possible risks and benefits of estrogen therapy, in particular for women in perimenopause (the year following a final period). I’ve written about the effects of estrogen regarding birth-control pills, but supplemental estrogen as it relates to menopause introduces a new–and possibly […]
Olde-Tymey Vice
Mara L. Keire, a member of the history faculty at the University of Oxford, has made a career out of studying debauchery. Her published works have included “Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” and “The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slavery Scare in the United States, […]