I don’t think anyone would mistake me for Marissa Mayer—the newly-appointed 37-year-old CEO of Yahoo who’s raising hackles all over town with her very public promise to return to work two weeks after delivering her first baby. For one thing, Read More
I was shocked—shocked—to hear about the backlash that erupted a few weeks ago after a mom on the Park Slope Parents message board complained about ice cream vendors infiltrating our local playgrounds, in a craven attempt to force their obesity-promoting, lactose-intolerant intolerant products on innocent children.
In the interest of full disclosure, I was eating a pint of ice cream—well, gelato—when I received my weekly PSP digest, which was otherwise a lovely and harmless collection of stories about people getting help spying on their nannies using iPhone apps, or choosing the right Jewish day school, that read like an ever-so-slightly ethnic Nicholas Sparks novel. But when I got to the blast about the the ice cream incident, I pushed back my stracciatella in shame. Read More
“Why is that baby being such a dick?”
This was in 2009. My husband, Jeff, and I were on our way to Berlin, and a toddler a few rows ahead of us was voicing dissatisfaction with his sudden corporeal confinement by making the sorts of noises Janis Joplin might have produced had she lived to accidentally stick her hand into a garbage disposal.
I rolled my eyes and returned to my US Weekly and Delta-issue merlot. “I know. What an asshole.”
John Lennon once sang of instant karma. But in my case, it took three years. Read More
It’s one thing to stop for a pomegranate frozen yogurt on the way home from the park, but Park Slope parents have had it with those ice cream trucks that are always lurking around the playground. (And no, this has nothing to do with boycotting Israel.)
In true Park Slope fashion, parents have taken to the infamous Park Slope Parents blog to air their grievances with the trucks, The New York Post reports. And rather than teaching kids to deal with temptations and master their impulses, parents would like those temptations removed. Now! Please. Read More
I signed up for Park Slope Parents, the notorious community listserv for procreating BroBos, under absurdly apropos circumstances: via 4G roaming Internet on an iPad 2 in a car on my way back from a President’s Day weekend trip to New England. As I typed away on my convenient keyboard dock, my five-month-old son sat beside me in his car seat, idly drooling on a tarted-up chew toy crafted to resemble an anthropomorphic toadstool with a nipple protruding from its head like a jaunty, pastel fez. This toy retails for almost $20, and is considered a steal at my local baby boutique, where it was sold to me by a cute lesbian shopkeep who favors ironic trucker hats.
The moment you realize you’ve become a cliche—strolling down upper Madison Avenue in your fur and turban, say, or arranging the artisanal cheese and pluot plate at the reception for the dystopian YA novel you Kickstarter-published—is a New York rite of passage. And there on I-95, as I sent in the $35 annual fee, I knew I had crossed the paper-thin threshold that separates the merely pretentious from the parodic: I had become the consummate SAHM (stay-at-home mom). Read More
No sooner had the blood dried in that Tucson parking lot and the body of 9-year-old Christina Green been lowered into the ground than “a large slice of educated America,” as David Brooks put it with his usual flair for evocative language, immediately switched its attention to one of the great issues of our day: Read More
A stagnant economy may rank right up there with bad breath, ugly shoes and emotional neediness among the things that prevent people from reproducing. According to a Centers for Disease Control study reported by the Associated Press, the number of births shrank 2.7 percent in 2009, despite an increase in the population.
The CDC contemplated the idea that Read More
