The Doree Chronicles

This is a real shoe you can buy for $1800 (a pair) at bergdorf...

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:57:53 -0500

This is a real shoe you can buy for $1800 (a pair) at bergdorf goodman.

save the date

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:57:02 -0500

I just got Elizabeth to commit to throwing a 90210 party with me on 9/02/10.

I might go as Andrea Zuckerman? Thank God I have ten months to decide.

I call Brenda! BRENDAAAAAAA!!!!!

meltzer: Sometimes I like to fantasize that someone hires me to create Marisa magazine or, while...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:49:04 -0500

meltzer:

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...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:25:16 -0500

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...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:10:24 -0500

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.

Secret Mission Rescues Yemen’s Jews [WSJ]

From Sunday’s Book Review: To the Editor: Andrew Hacker’s letter (Oct. 18) asks for the...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:29:46 -0500

From Sunday’s Book Review:

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:...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:23:00 -0400

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...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:35:44 -0400

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.

Stressful Jobs That Pay Badly News reporter is #4, just behind parole officer.

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:53:19 -0400

Stressful Jobs That Pay Badly

News reporter is #4, just behind parole officer.

Delightful.

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:16:45 -0400

Delightful.

Guys, I totally overcooked the squash tonight! But the steak came out perfectly.

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:33:22 -0400

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...

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:40:15 -0400

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.

faithandbegorrah: Bo Obama celebrates his 1st birthday. (OMG...

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:43:24 -0400

faithandbegorrah:

Bo Obama celebrates his 1st birthday. (OMG PINK TONGUE ALERT!!)

(White House Photostream, via Hortense’s post on Jezebel)

Coca-Cola’s got to be loving that Dasani product placement.

The NYTBR has published a counterpoint, by Book Review editor Gregory Cowles, to Michiko...

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:30:20 -0400

The NYTBR has published a counterpoint, by Book Review editor Gregory Cowles, to Michiko Kakutani’s evisceration of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City. Cowles writes approvingly, of a passage in the book, that it contains:

a wonderfully slippery list of references, at once dense and daft, as if Susan Sontag had written alternate lyrics to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Werner Herzog, Monte Hellman, Norman Mailer, Frederick Exley! Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!

Indeed, it seems as though the very things that gall Kakutani—the novel’s pretentiousness, portentousness, and self-importance—are the things that Cowles loves about Chronic City. So then, I suppose, the question becomes, do I want to read Kakutani’s version of literature or Cowles’s? And I suspect, in this case at least, it’s Kakutani’s that I will find more fulfilling.

This video of a beagle puppy playing with a Rottweiler...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:45:04 -0400

This video of a beagle puppy playing with a Rottweiler who’s probs 10 times his size might be the best video ever made, ever, in the world, of all time.

Afternoon fun.

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:33:22 -0400

Afternoon fun.

Experts Puzzle Over How Flight Overshot Airport: ”It just doesn’t make any...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:38:03 -0400

Experts Puzzle Over How Flight Overshot Airport:

”It just doesn’t make any sense,” said Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va. ”The pilots are saying they were involved in a heated conversation. Well, that was a very long conversation.”

Or a very long blow job.

I love Mary HK Choi. On Ann Taylor (in which she finds she agrees with Cintra Wilson): They still...

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:58:56 -0400

I love Mary HK Choi. On Ann Taylor (in which she finds she agrees with Cintra Wilson):

They still do some annoyingly LADYDRAG things like unnecessarily shirred collars on otherwise straightforward trenches but they don’t try to make cashmiracles from acrylic. In fact, they don’t DO anything particularly magical except make the trunks on their sweaters longer and make hardware on bags matte and substantial. But the really nice thing about Ann Taylor right now is that while the knits and the bouclé cropped jackets with 3/4 sleeves and lowered arm’s eyes and grosgrainribbondetailblablabla are all HELLA cute if you work in an office where dudes exclusively use Molton Brown toiletries, there are things for the more, ahem, housepants-wearing amongst us.

Yeah, so the eggplant parm came out perfectly.

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:48:00 -0400

Yeah, so the eggplant parm came out perfectly.

Part One of my Halloween costume has been purchased. But I’m going to need a Bedazzler to...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:41:43 -0400

Part One of my Halloween costume has been purchased.

But I’m going to need a Bedazzler to really make it perfect. Does anyone have one I can borrow?