My social life has gone to the dogs. I mean that literally. Many of the friends and neighborhood acquaintances that I now have are because of Buster, a spunky four-pound Yorkie, and his friend at my local dog run in Battery Park. The benches against the wall face North Cove Marina, where the occasional warning blast Read More
Memo to: Al Gore
From: Ari Gold
Subject: Your Oscar Speech
Dear Al:
Before I go any further here, allow me to apologize in advance for calling you “Al,” as opposed to “Mr. Vice President.”
Sure, it might seem overly familiar.
But Al—dude—VeepMan—now that you’ve got the Oscar nomination and you’re officially in show business, Read More
My grandmother’s whereabouts remain largely unknown. Well, to me they do. Naturally, my parents know exactly where she’s buried, and I know that place is somewhere in the New York metropolitan area. I remember driving from the funeral home in White Plains, sitting in the backseat with a rabbi who spoke to me like I Read More
My poet friend—call her Sylvia—thought she had a guy for me. “So dateable,” she told me. “Cute, smart, funny. Weirdly confessional, but in a good way—like you, actually. And an architect.”
I sat up. “Sold!” Architects have a certain cachet for me: They’re creative but more practical and stable than the writers and artists I Read More
In the wake of Boerum Hill’s “It”-ification, my father and I recently decided to ring the doorbell of our old house on Dean Street. The visit was odd for several reasons, the first being that the nice couple living in the house initially thought that I was my father’s wife. After I made it a Read More
Oh, I’ve been to Prague.
It was 1999, and I stood on the Charles Bridge and went to one of Kafka’s houses and drank the coffee and the beer (both of which were better over there, truly). And I thought it would cure me of my obsession with the movie Kicking & Screaming, Noah Baumbach’s Read More
What’s great about our new apartment is that we can have a fourth there,” a limber late-thirtysomething mommy pushing a double stroller said to her friend, another anorexic Gucci-clad-mommy-of-the-universe type.
“I love our fourth; he is my little angel,” she said, looking down into her $800 stroller. A mushy, not altogether unattractive toddler looked Read More
I’m not a Tennis Person. Nor am I a person who likes Tennis People. They’re a ruthless lot: cold, thin and not particularly sensitive to the feelings of others. So you can imagine how ashamed I am to have picked up a stubborn, nasty tennis habit. It just wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Read More
Every year, the media tends to beat certain words, phrases and concepts to death. Remember the Axis of Evil? Hanging chads? Soccer moms? Shock and awe?
Forget overexposure. These things quickly clock past cliché and head right into the Green Zone (ding—there’s one!) of cultural irrelevancy.
This year, in an attempt to get ahead Read More
A founding father and jet-setter, a kibbutznik and a bon vivant, a secular man in an Orthodox city, a Labor Party loyalist in a Likud stronghold, a dove among hawks, a cosmopolitan in the land of the shtetl, and a Zionist who tried to nudge Arab and Jew into peaceful co-existence—the Teddy Kollek I knew Read More
