Berthold was very short for an Austrian man. He was also quite a bit older than he had looked from across the room -- the lines around his eyes deeper, his face more determinedly weathered, but artfully so, like one of those distressed handmade journals bought in overseas marketplaces by people who are very serious about properly poeticizing their self-absorption; for example, people like me. We stood beaming idiotically at one another like befuddled dignitaries determined not to cause offense, I wondered if Berthold might not serve the same purpose as such a journal -- a sort of talismanic shortcut to authenticity, a leathery foreign object suitable for display in dimly lit cafés, telegraphing my literary ambitions, my credibility, my admirable commitment to tasteful pretension.

Continue Reading...

"No," he said, giving his shirttail a final tug. "But I'm about to be an Irritated Man."

I can't blame him. Since "Mad Men" entered the cultural consciousness, I have harassed my husband, an advertising creative director, with a multitude of questions, mostly of the facetious variety. "No," he replies, with diminishing patience, "I don't start drinking at 10 a.m., I'm not allowed to use my expense account for prostitutes, I don't compulsively pat the bottoms of secretaries at work. We don't even have secretaries anymore. That's a profession whose time has passed, like silversmiths and fletchers and the people who make barrels."

"Coopers," I say. "A person who makes barrels is called a cooper. As in Sterling Cooper."

"I have to go," he says. "I'll be home late. Don't wait up."

"Bye, Don," I say as the door closes. I turn to my cat. "Sally," I say sharply, "bring me my cigarettes from the bedroom. Then go watch TV." The cat stares at me for a few moments before contorting her torso to delicately slurp at her own anus, an entirely appropriate response. I wonder how many hours it will be before I can reasonably head for the liquor cabinet.

Continue Reading...

I had never heard of this magazine, which seemed a compelling reason to go: If I hadn't heard of it, it must be cool. My friend had left by the time I arrived, or had never shown at all, and I lingered on the sidelines of the party, not talking to anyone, sipping a free drink and hoping to pass off my crippling shyness for entitled reticence when a fairly well-known nightlife photographer approached me. He was one of these guys like Ryan McGinley or Terry Richardson, a specialist in the school of "Look at This Awesome Party You Didn't Go to Full of Amazing People You Don't Know." (The fact that said party is a sort of Beckettian constructed wilderness, at once everywhere and nowhere, is something you don't figure out until you're closing in on 30.) He told me he thought I was pretty and looked cool and asked if I would pose for some pictures. The party was winding down, so he suggested we go to a place down the street -- a very private, very under-the-radar, very hip club I had only read about -- and take some pictures there.

Continue Reading...

It wasn't that I liked school so much. It's that I hated summer.

Summer meant sweaty thighs sticking to plastic chairs and getting diaper rash, long after you had stopped wearing diapers. It meant waiting around at barbecues to scarf down a still-cold hot dog that tasted of freezer burn and lighter fluid. Worst of all, summer meant camp, where I would be required to live, play and shower with other children. I would be forced to sit atop an elderly horse as it plodded down a well-worn trail, stopping whenever a horse ahead paused to release a cascade of feces that hit the hard-packed dirt with a warm plop. It meant bleach burns in the arts and crafts shed, and being made to sing Zionist folk songs at dinner.

Continue Reading...

Now you can tell your grandchildren you lived through a time when oil prices were so high that some women resorted to trading their virtue for gas.

According to the Smoking Gun, a Kentucky woman is currently facing prostitution charges for doing just that, providing sex to a gas station customer in exchange for $100 paid on his Speedway card, or about 25 gallons' worth of gasoline.

Continue Reading...

Now, thanks to the intrepid psychologists of Northumbria, I understand why. She was threatened by his obvious sexual maturity (and what it might mean for her teenage daughter).

According to this study, carried out on British females 18-44, women are overwhelmingly more attracted to men with facial stubble, and tend to rate their potential for short-term flings and long-term relationships consistently higher than that of clean-shaven men or men with full beards.

The reasons for this are open to interpretation, and the psychologists involved in the study conclude thus:

"Facial hair, or beardedness, is a powerful sociosexual signal, and an obvious marker of sexual maturity ... A female preference for male faces with stubble or light beard was found ... This indicates that females are not selecting faces displaying relatively high or low masculinity, but are rather preferring males who are clearly mature, but not too masculinized."

Continue Reading...

The other ladies on the panel howled with laughter as Rivers expressed her surprise that the program had no delay and thus her very candid observation would be broadcast in its entirety, so that the pensioners and invalids watching at home could hear it, in between slurps of their Bovril and Lucozade! Blimey! (Take that, Jane Fonda!)

I thought the Brits were slightly more enlightened about this stuff -- and I assumed, as Rivers did, that they brought her on for a reason and she delivered -- but apparently not, as Rivers was immediately escorted out of the studio and presenter Jackie Brambles was forced to make an on-air apology. But there are no hard feelings. In a statement issued later, Rivers said: "Yes, I swore, and I'm so fucking sorry."

Continue Reading...

According to Sabine Durrant, writing amusingly for Intelligent Life magazine: "A straw poll among friends and relations would suggest the contention is so irrefutable that evidence is barely necessary." She goes on to quote one Esme, 38, who just had a long-awaited date night with her husband, scarce since the birth of their child, and could barely engage him in conversation. Says Esme: "If I'd been with you or another girlfriend, we'd have been gabbling away 19 to the dozen." (Whatever that means -- something British for talking a lot, I guess.)

Various other women are quoted in the piece (which is definitely worth a read), and the general consensus seems to be that men are less adept at small talk or conversing in social settings, a theory confirmed by none other than Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge (and, incidentally, cousin of the presumably not boring Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Borat), who has argued that "the female brain is primarily wired for empathy and the male brain for understanding and building systems." Which would seem to point to the idea that men in general are not inherently boring but perhaps less apt to notice when they are boring others.

Continue Reading...

The New York Times Fashion and Style section weighed in recently on the clothes that make the woman, favorably comparing the bouffant pageboy and sleek, '60s-inspired shifts to that fabled paragon of all that is good and stylish and thin about America, Jackie Kennedy herself. But Jackie Kennedy with soul, explains Vogue guru André Leon Talley, in the delightfully frank and reductive language of high fashion: "A black Camelot moment is the right moment for the Obamas. And so the faux pearls, the A-line dresses, and the Jackie Kennedy flip are obviously all part of how her image strategy has evolved."

Agreed. Oddly, the Times also compares Obama in the very first paragraph to ... Barbara Bush. Barbara Bush? Really? What's the logic on that, Paper of Record? Well, the pearls, you see. Barbara Bush wears pearls, Michelle Obama wears pearls, therefore, Bush = Obama. But Jackie Kennedy wore big fake pearls -- André Leon Talley just said so!

Continue Reading...

Upon talking with a woman at a party, who had every semblance of confidence, maturity and fulfillment (every semblance, that is, except for a ring on the all-important finger), the subject of sex and marriage came up. The sex therapist recounts:

"She immediately described herself as happily single. And yet her body language told another story: Chloe crossed her arms defensively over her chest until I just wanted to shout: 'Yes my dear, now try pulling another one.'"

Hmm. You don't suppose her body language seemed defensive because she realized she was talking to a hostile busybody eager to make snap judgments about her life on the spot and write disparagingly about her in an international newspaper, do you?

Continue Reading...

"Women's Talk" closed in Beirut in February after a staggering two-year run (your friendly neighborhood theater professional will tell you how difficult it is to keep a show up and running this long, and that's without constant calls for your stoning). The show is an act of bravery and a stunning move toward lifting the veil (pardon the pun) on the world of Muslim women, a group commonly -- and erroneously -- marginalized by Western and Muslim societies alike.

But according to this piece in the L.A. Times, it's hardly a singular achievement.

Continue Reading...

Well, according to exciting new scientific research, he is!

I know. I'll give you a few moments to pick yourself up off the floor. Next they'll be telling us that some men experience temporary psychosis while watching sporting events or occasionally enjoy inserting their penises into warm, wet holes and moving them up and down. But there's more!

Continue Reading...

It was very hot, one of the worst summers on record. The van was filthy -- crammed with equipment, sleeping bags and unwashed bodies. My boyfriend was sweet and wonderful, but his bandmates (not unfairly) resented my presence, and when tensions between the frontman and me flared into full-scale conflict, causing him to permanently revoke my in-transit bathroom privileges, my parents arranged a plane ticket home. All in all, not the most enjoyable experience, but chock-full of valuable lessons: how to assemble and disassemble a drum kit in record time, that it was possible to survive on a diet of gummy worms and beer, and that sad boys who write sad songs about love are often total jackasses.

Still, it was a real-life rock 'n' roll tour. I was living the rock lifestyle, and I felt certain that it presaged the adventures to come -- new and glamorous escapades in my new and glamorous life.

Continue Reading...

According to this Mental Floss article, in the 19th century, "the Victorian lady rarely exercised or engaged in physical activity, which left her poorly conditioned." But the appearance and popularity of the bicycle in the late 1800s changed all that. Unlike horses, which could be difficult to control (particularly when one was trammeled by the dangerously ladylike convention of riding sidesaddle), "bicycles, by comparison, were easy to manipulate. There was no reason a woman couldn't get on a bike and sedately pedal farther from her home than she'd ever been before."

I used to live in Holland, where bicycles are as much a part of the landscape as cars are in the States, and the sense of freedom when you are riding across a perfectly flat landscape with the wind at your back can be pretty exhilarating, physically and psychologically. But reading this, I can't help thinking, a little sadly, of the spinning classes I walk past every day at the gym -- 30 or 40 women, all in terrific shape, pedaling none too sedately … and going nowhere.

Continue Reading...

As it turns out, reading my way to manhood is a lot like my 11th-grade curriculum ("Moby-Dick," "A Farewell to Arms," "Self-Reliance," "The Federalist Papers"), and apparently, also crucial to one's masculine development are Theodore Roosevelt, political philosophy from hundreds or even thousands of years ago (Plato's "Republic," "Leviathan," "The Prince") and World War II.

Continue Reading...

The Japanese lingerie maker has invented the "photovoltaic-powered bra," which features a solar panel that can generate enough electricity to charge a small electrical device. The upside? There's no excuse for your phone running out of battery power again! The downside? Since the device is solar powered, you have to wear your bra on the outside of your clothes.

Continue Reading...

This is a fascinating phenomenon, and as someone with a significant history of mental illness in her family (and having seen the attendant shame and havoc its stigmatization can cause for the sufferers and their families), I applaud any effort to bring these issues "out of the closet" and steer the national discourse on mental health away from tabloid dispatches of "Britney's Private Hell" and toward some semblance of reality. Obviously, the New York Times does, too, which is precisely why it put a feature on a subject of this kind of universal import … at the top of the Sunday Styles section?

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Mattel, which first introduced the world to the miracle of structural engineering known as Barbie Millicent Roberts in 1959, is suing the living daylights out of Bratz creator Carter Bryant, a former Mattel employee, on the grounds of copyright infringement. Looks like there's only room for one lushly proportioned polyurethane poppet in town.

And in no uncertain terms! Wait till you see the frantic internal Mattel memos released as part of the court documents, describing the success of the Bratz brand as "a rival-led Barbie genocide." Yes, the G-word, conjuring horrible images of shaven-headed Skippers corralled in Barbie prison-of-war camps being terrorized by machete-wielding Bratz dolls (or maybe that was just my sister and me). Not content to let Barbie have the last word, MGA memos counter that Mattel planned to "litigate to the death" (italics mine) and that "this is a war, and sides must be taken."

Continue Reading...