It used to be that I never wrote in books. Then I decided that if it was my book, it was okay to write in. But library books? They shouldn...

Every couple of years, I sit down and dump my blog to one of the printing services, so that if (when) the internet blows up, I have a copy. ...

I confess that I never go to the movies. Or maybe once a year - which is awfully close to never. It means that by the time the Oscars roll a...

Today's entertaining/appalling news story is that " The Parmesan Cheese You Sprinkle on Your Penne Could Be Wood ". Now, the...

Me, heathen atheist, I only set foot in churches for weddings, funerals, and sightseeing. Yesterday morning, though, found me in pew 12 on t...

​Big props to the young man getting off the subway with The Power Broker tucked under his arm. Excellent book. Ought to be required reading...

You know the Toast, right? The Toast is funny. The Toast has Mallory Ortberg writing things about refrigerators (yogurt never goes bad at h...

Sometimes when I'm brushing my teeth at night, standing before the bathroom mirror, in my horizontally striped nightgown, I notice - to ...

Several years ago, a friend - one of the semi-imaginary ones, someone I've met in person a few times, but a person I mostly know on-line...

Goodreads tells me that I read 79 books in 2015. I know that included in that total are five books that I abandoned because I just couldn...

A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, we were invited out to dinner. I offered to make a dessert, and planned to make the lemon tart from ...

Half way through its decoration, the tree fell down. We wept, and swept up the broken ornaments. But their beauty cried out, so we spread th...

Do you know that there's a product out there called Perma Hedge? It's the green fuzzy plastic stuff that's supposed to make a c...

Back in 1988, I had a job at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I was living in Manhattan, with my then boyfriend/now husband, and more often th...

1) The one about Alastair Macauley and his obsession with the dearth of male/male or female/female duets in classical ballet . 2) The on...

May your turkeys be wild and your cranberries be juicy! (Isn't that a nice image? Thank the British Library , and remember, if the Pi...

For our anniversary back in June, my sister-in-law gave us a pain de mie pan - loaf pan with a lid to make a soft-crusted sandwich bread th...

The problem with used book sales is the sieve of a brain that completely forgets that one already owns that book. Case in point: I, buy...

Despite the fact that I have been known to rail about the lunacy of book logs for elementary school children, because they turn reading int...

I was going to write about ocean beaches and tides. I was going to write about taking my daughter bra shopping. Instead, I'm perplex...