I'm pushing 30, and my face is showing some new, not entirely welcome, lines. My skin care regimen may not turn back the clock, but it does make me glow.
I remember as a kid being baffled by the Oil of Olay ads that interrupted my after-school dates with “Guiding Light.” A lovely young woman looked straight into the camera and said, “Oil of Olay will help keep you looking younger too,” and, “Grow old gracefully? No way! I’m going to fight it every step of the way.” I looked at the woman and thought: But she’s not old! I also wondered, doesn’t everyone want to get older?
I’ve been pretty blasi about aging ever since, but as I close in on 30 I’m starting to worry a bit about the fine lines I see, etched ever deeper, around my eyes; about keeping the texture of my skin soft, smooth and even. When I asked my mom for advice — she’s 59 and looks positively radiant and about 10 years younger than she is — she recommended Philosophy.
I’m not talking about Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. Philosophy is a line of skin care products with silly names (Big Mouth lip plumper, Think Big eye pencil, Soul Owner exfoliating foot cream) and hokey sayings (Help Me, a nighttime face treatment, says: “Help me, help myself, so that I may help others”) on the packages. Founded by Christina Carlino, a former acne sufferer, Philosophy products are available in department stores, at Sephora or online. I’ve liked everything I’ve tried — the Cinnamon Buns body wash, for example, smells like fresh pastry, and the lip moisturizer didn’t need constant reapplication and provided a nice shine — but there are three items I can’t live without: the Hope in a Jar daily moisturizer, the When Hope Is Not Enough nighttime moisturizer and Shelter, a sunscreen of 15 SPF made especially for the face.
Hope in a Jar — described on the package as “a drink of water” for your skin — feels like satin on your fingertips, looks like a potion concocted of the whitest melted pearls and vanishes the moment you put it on your face. It has a light scent, one that can only be described as fresh. And unlike so many face lotions I’ve tried, it’s not greasy. At night, I actually look forward to washing my face, because when I’m done I get to dip my fingers into my “When Hope Is Not Enough” jar. The nighttime moisturizer is pearly like the daytime one, with just a little more weight, and it too smells fresh — like sea salt. You only need to use a small amount of each moisturizer, so even though they cost a bit more than something from, say, CVS, I find myself spending about the same as I did before, when I was always trying new things.
For daytime, I use Hope in a Jar in combination with Shelter, a sunscreen. It is like a nongreasy suntan lotion, except bright white and totally fragrance-free, and it doesn’t drag down the moisturizer. I put the sunscreen on second — for no other reason than a friend told me that I should — and it disappears right away, too. No heavy rubbing in or wiping off white blobs that won’t absorb. Everyone and my mother, literally, have told me that sunscreen is the key to staying young, that it’s the big red ball in the sky that gives us wrinkles and ages us, so I take my Shelter seriously.
I can definitely say that since I started using Philosophy, my skin looks better — more glowing. Of course, it probably helps that using these products has gotten me on a skin care schedule; now I actually take off my eyeliner and mascara at night instead of sleeping all made up and waking up a smudged, black-eyed mess. And while I can’t say for sure that these products are making me look younger — they don’t claim to be anti-aging, exactly — that’s not really what I’m looking for, yet. For now, I just want to keep getting carded; I want people to act surprised when I tell them how old I am; and I want my younger boyfriend to think we look the same age.
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We want to hear about the trinkets, devices, conveniences and extravagances that have you smitten. (Please remember: Any writing submitted becomes the property of Salon if we publish it. We reserve the right to edit submissions, and cannot reply to every writer.)
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When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, he would walk into family gatherings and find that the mere sight of him would move his older relatives to tears. “Oh, he looks just like Shmiel!,” they would cry, in Yiddish. All Mendelsohn knew of Shmiel was that he, the oldest brother of his grandfather, had been killed, along with this wife and four daughters, by Nazis during the war. That crumb of information was tantalizing enough to inspire long-lasting curiosity and, as its subtitle makes plain — “The Lost” is Mendelsohn’s attempt to find out who these relatives were, and what exactly happened to them. After traveling thousands of miles, visiting the Ukraine, Israel and any place else where someone might have known someone else who knew his uncle, Mendelsohn discovers that the truth of what happened to his relatives was quite a bit more complicated — and surprising — than anyone had known. The story is gripping, but along the way “The Lost” reveals itself to be so much more than a Holocaust family memoir: it’s also a page-turning mystery, a lesson on how history is written and a work of religious scholarship. This is a book that you start and think: I have never read a book like this one before. 
Alice Sheldon had many selves. As a child in the 1920s, she went on safari through Africa with her socialite parents. She could fly planes and shoot guns. During World War II, she worked for military intelligence and after it, for the CIA. She was a clinical psychologist, and published a short story in the New Yorker. But her most daring and successful adventure in self-creation was posing for several years as a man, the innovative science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., who carried on many intense correspondences with such authors as Ursula K. Le Guin and Phillip K. Dick, until her real name and gender were discovered by tenacious fans. Everyone who knew “Tiptree” was flabbergasted to learn “he” was really a woman, but whether anyone really knew Sheldon — even her husband of decades, with whom she died in a suicide pact — is the question Julie Phillips pursues in this astute, sensitive and always fascinating biography. The life was remarkable, and so is the telling of it. 
If most food writing seems like an covert form of narcissism, Pollan explodes the genre out of its navel-gazing constraints and offers a rare, expansive view of what and how we eat. Inexhaustibly inventive and imaginative, Pollan jazzes up what could have been a dreary jeremiad about the “industrial food chain” by inviting us to view the modern American diet as the triumph of a formerly obscure South American grass that has manipulated humanity into making it one of the most successful plants on earth: King Corn — it’s in nearly every processed food. He highlights an obscure scientist without whose great invention — the synthesis of nitrogen fertilizer — billions of people could not have been born (or at least, not have been fed), and he explains just how much oil goes into “making” one conventionally raised steer (about a barrel). There’s an observation to blow your mind on nearly every page of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — the sections on “industrial organic” farming and an entirely foraged meal are also revelatory — about this most basic of human needs. 
The unusual provenance of this novel — Eggers has written it in the first-person voice of a real man, Valentino Achak Deng, and all of the events in the story are true, although not all of them happened to Deng — is complicated. The result is sublime simplicity, the ego-less conveyance by Eggers of Deng’s plain-spoken, gentle, world-weary but never hopeless voice. One of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Deng saw his village destroyed by Arab militiamen as a little boy and fled alone into a chaotic landscape before joining a troupe of similarly dispossessed boys on an epic journey on foot to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Hunger, thirst, lions, crocodiles and soldiers on both sides of Sudan’s civil war harried all of them and killed some. Deng finally made it to the promised land of America, but we know from the start that it proved to be no paradise. The novel’s framing device — Deng imagines telling his life story to thieves who beat and bind him while robbing his house and to the jaded officials who deal with the crime’s aftermath — is inspired; instead of making him pitiful, this silent appeal emphasizes Deng’s remarkable, ineradicable dignity. 
Deborah Eisenberg’s short stories seem ready-made for this age of overcommitment. In just a few deceptively straightforward pages you get all the depth, breadth and nuance that other writers require whole novels to build. The stories in this newest collection are all tinged to one degree or another by 9/11, but the attacks don’t feature as significantly as the depredations of age, psychiatric fragility and that chronic weakness of Eisenberg characters, self-doubt. (Tellingly, the one story here that makes 9/11 its main focus — the title story, unfortunately — is the only disappointment.) What lifts Eisenberg’s work above the usual fiction in this mode is her uncanny ability, shared only with Alice Munro, to conjure an entire multifarious life in the span of a few incidents. This gives her stories an unusual suspense; you’re always waiting for the moment when the spell takes its effect and a human being materializes right before your very eyes. 
It makes perfect sense that the best novel about 9/11 — a collective memory by now encrusted in a layer of pieties — would be a biting satire. Kalfus chronicles the awful divorce of New Yorkers Joyce and Marshall; things have gotten so acrimonious that when each one suspects the other has died in the tragedy, they both secretly rejoice. Don’t mistake this for a book about how 9/11 affected our personal lives, though. Instead, it’s for every nice middle-class American who pleads astonishment at the malice and savagery of the attacks. Kalfus shows us that the far-off national conflicts we find so baffling and complicated actually work a lot like a really bad divorce — both are furious clashes between people who can’t get along but who also can’t escape each other. And let’s face it: Most of us know a lot more about divorce than we do about the Middle East. The novel’s story — rich with betrayals and outrageous antics and a couple of expertly drawn and miserable kids — never staggers under its thematic load. It remains always razor sharp, true to life, light on its feet and sneakily tragic. 
Novels about African dictatorships are supposed to be dour and educational, the literary equivalent of Brussels sprouts — good for you if not especially tasty. The great Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o capsizes that formula with “Wizard of the Crow,” an outrageously entertaining, madcap political farce set in the fictional nation of Aburiria, whose despot is known only as The Ruler and has been running things for as long as anyone can remember. When the book’s educated but destitute hero, fleeing a police constable, tries to throw the cop off his trail with a sign boasting of the awesome powers of the Wizard of the Crow, he inadvertently sets himself up as the sorcerer du jour. Soon, he’s mixed up in the affairs of scheming government ministers, fatuous businessmen, a ruthless political climber and an elusive band of rebels. The novel is full of disguises, mistaken identities, tall tales, slapstick, hairs-breadth escapes and double-crosses. Ngugi’s political satire is deep enough to apply to Midwestern regional marketing managers in addition to strutting West African tyrants — aren’t all tyrants the same, after all? — because its real subject is human folly in all its many, hilarious and heartbreaking forms. 
This is not your grandfather’s Civil War novel, but who would expect that from Stephen Wright, that rare combination of literary wild man and flawless prose stylist? A Candide-like figure named Liberty Fish — child of a renegade Southern belle and the Yankee abolitionist she eloped with — joins the Union army and wends his way back to his maternal grandfather’s plantation. Along the way, he meets all sorts of people — pirates, soldiers, preachers and con men — most of them driven half (or all the way) mad by their inability to make the American dream of freedom and the American reality of race add up to anything plausible. At the end of his journey he finds the heart of the nightmare in its ultimate, florid, night-blooming manifestation: his demented grandfather, Asa, trying to create — avant Norman Mailer — a white negro. This novel is a plummet down the black rabbit hole of American utopianism, with the brakes off and the seat belts removed, and it’s one hell of a ride. 
Pakistan’s crippling turf war 
Occupy fights the law: Will the law win? 
The right’s lost causes 
Unhappy Valentine’s Day in Israel 
What a GOP cave looks like 
U.S. media takes the lead on Iran 
Interview With My Bully: When I confronted my bully about racism 
Iran’s Greens aim to rise again 
The prettiest boy in the world 
Should I donate a kidney to my friend? 
