Author: Ann Bauer

It’s a slippery, messy business, kissing. Two tongues meetings in one person’s mouth, touching and rolling and wrestling like snakes. The transfer of saliva. The hot, warm breath vaporous with what the kisser has most recently consumed. Not only that, even strangers do it. People who’ve only just met in bars; partygoers on New Year’s…

My husband and I found ourselves over the weekend in that gap between wedding ceremony and reception and desperately in need of a drink. Now, I must admit, I’m a bit bewildered by the whole traditional formal wedding affair. It’s always seemed to me more show than celebration, a day seized by the "happy" couple…

I would like to tell you that my daughter and I spend quality time together watching the Masterpiece series of Jane Austen stories: pretty, bonneted heroines practicing archery and dropping calling cards and plotting to win the hearts of handsome young men. I would like to tell you that. But it’s just not true. A…

It is an established fact that we human beings want what we cannot have. When exorbitantly priced iPhones hit the market—already in limited supply—people line up at 2 a.m. And by telling a couple they are not allowed to have sex for a week, therapists say they can cause even the most uninterested spouse to…

OK, I know what cheese is. And I also know — because I researched it once — why it exists. In nomadic societies, back when people had to carry their food on their backs as they moved from place to place, and spoilage was a huge and potentially life-threatening issue, particularly in the heat, tribes…

For a long time, whenever people asked me to recommend a restaurant — not by food critic standards, but a personal favorite — I immediately told them to go to jP American Bistro. Why? It was everything: the simple, clean decor; the mid-priced menu with absolutely drop-dead beautiful, satisfying perfectly-proportioned dishes; the crack staff that…