Baking is a matter of precision and timing, but I just make things up as I go.
When my husband and I first became parents, we joked that our chubby baby was destined to grow into an Alex P. Keaton Reaganite - the most unlikely, and therefore hilarious, course for the child of an interracial gay couple in gentrifying Brooklyn.
To be five years old is to be surprised by life. I'm amused by my children's awe at quotidian things - a toy helicopter, a bubble bath, the visible tentacles on a plate of calamari. And I'm envious of their ability to attain something I often can't: a state of transcendence induced by art.
Truly smart people and truly smart dressers share one thing in common: They make it look easy.
If you've ever watched a television cartoon, you know that kids don't appreciate subtlety, though perhaps that's because they're not often offered it.
Form ossifies into genre through repetition.
It comforts the adult conscience to remember that, amid history's grave injustices, there were still great lives.
Does a bona fide chimichurri have cilantro in it? Who cares? Cooking for your family, unless your family includes Joel Rubouchon, is liberating in that regard.
Is deciding what you like an instinct, a sense that arrives as swiftly as my autoimmune response to cat dander? Or is it the result of reasoned consideration, the way wine tasters swish pinot noir around in their mouths, spit it out, and reach for complex metaphors about chocolate and tobacco?
It is true for my family and many others: Adoption has made us infinitely richer in the ways that matter most.
Class is very, very fertile territory for American artists, and it has been for a long time.
Among this country's enduring myths is that success is virtuous, while the wealth by which we measure success is incidental. We tell ourselves that money cannot buy happiness, but what is incontrovertible is that money buys stuff, and if stuff makes you happy, well, complete the syllogism.
Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon.
I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working, or I'd never get anything down on the page.
Usually, when you see clothes on a model, by some transitive property, that garment is imbued with her beauty.
Years ago, I worked at a fashion magazine. I was the lowest man on the totem pole, one of the only men on that particular pole: a little brother with a dozen older sisters whose grace and glamour I so admired.
The person most qualified to tell the tale of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the man himself, as gifted an intellect as he is an athlete.
When I look at the list of my favorite works, writers who are women do tend to outnumber writers who are men for whatever reason.
I didn't know, at 22, that regret is useless. If I could go back and change something - give myself some big break, pass along some secret information, reassure myself that most things would, in fact, work out - I don't think I would.
It's my own personal hang-up, but I find adults who are picky eaters to be the worst. I don't mean food allergies or preferences: I mean picky eaters. We all know one, and they're impossible to go to lunch with or invite over for a dinner party.
