Some of the stuff I've written for other people is on my other website.
I also co-edit Postcards From Yo Momma.
Email me: thedoreechronicles [at] gmail [dot] com
Sometimes I like to fantasize that someone hires me to create Marisa magazine or, while we’re firmly in fantasy territory, Sassy 2.0 and I start putting together my dream team of writers and editors. (Does anyone else do this?) I think Joon would get the back page.
Please create Marisa magazine.
This is the kind of political analysis I am interested in reading:
I don’t think [Bill Thompson]’s the RIGHT kind of douchebag. Ed Koch was also a douchebag, but he was a douchebag in the right way. Giuliani transcends douchebaggery and shoots up to a level of dickslappery for which a word has not yet been invented, but he also had something that made for effective governance (not that I’m endorsing what he did, but he was able to push it through). I don’t get any sense from Thompson that he’d be able to utilize his own internal doucebagness to make things happen.
The few remaining Jews of Yemen have mostly been resettled in Monsey, N.Y., with a few going to Israel. They had been living pre-modern lives:
Raida became the last redoubt of Yemeni Jews, who continued to lead a simple life there alongside Muslims.
Ancient stone homes dot the town. Electricity is erratic; oil lamps are common. Water arrives via truck. Most homes lack a TV or a refrigerator. The cell phone is the only common modern device. Some families receive financial aid from Hasidic Jewish groups in Brooklyn and London, which has enabled them to buy cars.
Typically, the Jewish men are blacksmiths, shoe repairmen or carpenters. They sometimes barter, trading milk and cow dung for grass to feed their livestock. In public, the men stand out for their long side curls, customarily worn by observant Jewish men. Jewish women, who often marry by 16, rarely leave home. When they do, like Muslim women, only their eyes are exposed.
For fun, children play with pebbles and chase family chickens around the house. At Jewish religious schools, they sit at wooden tables to study Torah and Hebrew. They aren’t taught subjects like science, or to read and write in Arabic, Yemen’s official language.
Also, one of the women—I guess when she was trying to leave the country, though the article doesn’t say—tried to board the plane with a live chicken.
To the Editor:
Andrew Hacker’s letter (Oct. 18) asks for the progenitor of the term “WASP.” He says that he first heard it at a Princeton faculty party and that he first used it in an article in 1957.
I could not persuade my son, Tad Friend, in his book “Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor” (reviewed Sept. 27) to date the term back to at least 1952, when I first heard it. It was used upon me then by a Jewish girlfriend from Queens College, who socialized with young writers at Columbia University, who used it too. I therefore suggest that the term may not have a single progenitor, and that it may have arisen in such circles as a critique of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It was probably a simple term of cultural derogation — although Professor Hacker’s inquiry may yet find an individual claimant.
THEODORE FRIEND
Villanova, Pa.
Could the Jewish girlfriend of Tad Friend’s father’s who “socialized with young writers from Columbia University” please come forward?
(Best letter ever, obviously.)
Ahhh, Pete Wells gives a shout-out to the best, dearly departed food truck on the Penn campus: Sophie’s. Their meatball subs (did I call it a meatball hoagie then? Can a hoagie even be hot? I can’t remember) were perfect. They made them to order—none of that powdered Parmesan cheese crap—in an oven in the truck. Then one day, just like that, Sophie’s was gone, and meatball subs in Philadelphia were never quite the same. Primo’s on Market Street made a pretty good one, though, as I recall.
(Also, I understand the inherent regional appeal of the cheesesteak, but I would argue that the roast pork sandwich at Tommy Dinic’s—topped with broccoli rabe and provolone—is the best sandwich in Philadelphia.)
Lee has been exploring different hangout spots in our new apartment. (She prefers enclosed spaces, like the bathroom, or somewhere she can lie up against something, or her bed.) Today she’s taken over the space between the table and the couch.
News reporter is #4, just behind parole officer.
Guys, I totally overcooked the squash tonight! But the steak came out perfectly.
Frank Rich on Balloon Boy’s dad:
There’s also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn’t find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on “Wife Swap,” an ABC reality program, it’s easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus.
