When I was twenty-four, I decided to bake a cake for my boyfriend’s birthday. Matty was a wannabe rock star and the coolest guy I’d ever dated. I really wanted to pull off something cool, something special, something his mother would never have made. The limits of my first apartment kitchen forced my creativity into … Read more
One of the unsung pleasures of a summer weekend in an English country house is the short shelf of books left in the spare bedroom for the entertainment of guests. If you are out of luck, the row of volumes on the bedside table consists of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, Regency bodice-rippers by the likes … Read more
Fashion fuels itself on the past, spinning out retreads, revivals, and re-interpretations, produced at what seems to be an ever-faster rate. In fact, because of this profusion of styles, you’d have to go back to the early 90s to find evidence of the last really big rally around one particular look. For a few short … Read more
Sometimes, Grace Kolenda Deters dreams in Portuguese. Ordinary dreams are of her daily life in Nevada, her home five hundred feet above Lake Tahoe, with its shore-to-shore views. Or scenes from past decades spent in Minneapolis: graduate school, therapy, her daughter’s ice-skating lessons, snow. Less often, she dreams of lilies. Or of the boils … Read more
Why wasn’t David Rakoff delighted about the prospect of being exiled to a desert island, even a fantasy one? After all, the Canadian-born writer and actor said “OK” when Outside magazine asked him to take “an intense, weeklong wilderness course, where I was trained in primitive skills such as animal tracking, skinning, shelter construction, and … Read more
At first, Indigo McCarthy hadn’t realized that an agent from the Department of Agriculture was shadowing him. But he soon learned. The pursuit started at U.S. Postal Service Station No. 4245. The Ag agent was a mole in USPS who’d requested a transfer to Vermontville, the tiny hamlet bordering the resort lake. A lot of … Read more
**Note: See the July 20th NYTimes Magazine cover excerpt from Carr’s forthcoming book, The Night of the Gun. Carr discusses the book August 14th at Magers and Quinn Booksellers and August 18th at Common Good Books.** David Carr is slouched against the sweaty door of a cab whose shock absorbers long ago lost the battle … Read more
Lisa LaVerdiere is clearly tired of being asked the question: “How do you remember all their names?” “I tell people, ‘Didn’t you go to high school? Don’t you know two hundred people?’” she asks incredulously. The 225 or so animals that reside at Home for Life in Star Prairie, Wisconsin, may look interchangeable to most … Read more
Michael McGillis is at the Franconia Sculpture Park, standing in a pile of cut-and-scattered wood. He’s wearing shorts, heavy work boots, and a straw hat, and is looking sweaty and overwhelmed. His work in progress, Paper Cut, isn’t really turning out the way he’d planned. He began by digging a curving trench; in his mind’s … Read more
On a Minneapolis fall morning, arriving buses plant casual-Friday-dressed workers along Hennepin Avenue. At most stops, jean-jacketed and khakied women and polo-shirted men stream out, but the passengers who disembark at 730 Hennepin are a different variety. They run the gamut of fashion, from dress shirts and polished shoes to hijabs to basketball jerseys to … Read more