My friend Matt paid me a visit to confide his anxieties about his impending marriage. “I wonder if I’m cut out for the whole thing, the enormity of it,” he said. “It’s not hesitation about the person, just a reckoning with the profundity of the challenge ahead, even in the best of
Jealousy may be the closest a sane person can get to the experience of psychosis. I'm referring to the kind of florid, full-blown jealousy that strikes poor, enraged Leontes in The Winter's Tale—a jealousy that leads to complete ruin. It is sometimes confused with envy, but the difference is
Desire is a question to which there is no answer, yet much of the time it's the only question that matters. "Love . . . makes one little room, an everywhere," wrote John Donne. Death, in its not-so-different way, does the same. The place of one's final heartbeat is immense, or so it seemed to me at
My friend Tom invited me to visit him in Tbilisi. He's a fearless, openhearted man, an international aid worker who had put in hard time in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Now, he was the head of child protection for UNICEF in Georgia. "You can stay at my apartment, I've plenty of room. It'll more than
I've been thinking about constricted spaces lately, those crammed, no-exit corners that make us feel diminished in some way, wishing to expand, to break free. In New York, you fit yourself into these spaces daily. They have a way of dictating the very procedure of your mind: the segments, the modules,
What is it about the promise of a frozen treat on a hot day that can make a five-year-old wake up in the pitch black of 5:00 am and pad to his mother’s bedside to poke her unceremoniously and ask: “Is it time to make the popsicles?” (No. No, it is not. Not before daylight, and certainly never
An American journalist in Iraq discovers just what a good meal can mean during uncertain times.
'Tis the season, and I suspect there is no one on earth capable of embracing it more festively than David Wondrich. His first book about cocktails, Imbibe! (2007), is a rousing call to the bar in the form of the life and times of pioneering nineteenth-century bartender—and author of The Bartender's
It all began with Billi Bi. The creamy, mussel-studded concoction "may well be the most elegant and delicious soup ever created," according to 1950s food guru Craig Claiborne, and one taste of it in a friend's kitchen is what sent me to a bookstore some fifteen years ago in search of a copy of The
In the 1980s, we had urban cowboys. Now, we have urban farmers. Where John Travolta in a cowboy hat and big belt buckle was once the emblem of a newly citified country boy, today trends lean in the other direction, with urbanites going back—partway, at least—to the land. Dressed in everything
My first visit to New Orleans didn't happen until 2002, in my early thirties, shamefully late in life for someone who likes to eat as much as I do. What I found when I arrived, at least culinarily speaking, did not disappoint: the roast-beef and gravy po'boys on Magazine Street, the oysters as big
Gourmet, as anyone with even the vaguest interest in food knows, is gone. That this is cause for sober reflection practically goes without saying. It was a cornerstone of the food-writing world, one that nurtured adventurous cooks long before most people in America knew what an artichoke was.
Brillat-Savarin's classic work exhorts us to eat, drink, and most of all be merry.
Americans have a long and contradictory history of imbibing and proscribing.
Appreciations of ice cream and cake celebrate the deliciously fattening over the guiltily consumed fake.
