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
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
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
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
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
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
Teeming with beautiful people who routinely burn beds or weep openly out on its streets, Pedro Almodóvar’s Madrid is a strange and magical place. Exploding in color, it is a city subjected to a constant torrent of emotion and deceit churned up by outrageous women and handsome but impotent men. The Spanish capital—where all his … Read more
The patterns in Andrea Carlson’s paintings swirl in the corner of your eye and hold a fierce repose when you look at them straight on. There’s something living in there. It’s not so much complicated as simply un-nameable. In Aadinzookanaag (Spirits), for instance, angular cloud shapes stay just at the edge of resolving into figures … Read more
Dear Nostalgia, I hate you. And yet, you are brilliant. Because if I ever stop hating you, I will long for the days when I did hate you and then I will hate you all over again. The French called you maladie du pays—the disease of home—which, though I hate you, does not do you … Read more
It has come to my attention that I’m a messy eater, which wouldn’t be such a problem were I not so often clothed at the scene of the crime. Properly seated at a dining table, kitted out with a shroud-sized napkin, seltzer water, and an array of absorbent paper products, I can confidently churn through … Read more