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So does that gal attempting to auction off her virginity to the highest bidder remind anyone else of the young woman at Yale who was supposedly documenting her multiple self-induced miscarriages as a senior art project a while back? Not that I have any trouble believing that lots of people would cash that check. Yet something about ...

That Atlantic piece on the imminent demise of the New York Times as sheets you can cram into your oversized purse is really haunting me: How would Sundays ever be the same? While our kids are receiving religious instruction they can't remember the gist of 10 minutes later, would we have to lug our laptops to the corner coffee shop in order to ...

I love your post, Ellen, and your point (and June's) that as Frank Loesser put it, ''You can't go to jail for what you're thinkin'—or for the woo look in your eye. ...'' As I've said before, (almost all) of my old (pretend) flames are either making Cialis commercials now, or else have become even more definitively unavailable. Yet my still more ...

Dahlia, when you give these work-life balance talks, do you tell the young women who've come to hear you the unvarnished truth? Because I'd have to say that I tend to accentuate the happier truth (that writing is one of the most flexible careers around, girls, because you can tailor and re-tailor it to meet your ever-changing needs!) over those ...

OK, that's a lie. But I was the breadwinner for a while when we lived in Italy, where this man spent mornings lingering over his cornetto and cappuccino, and got to know everyone in our neighborhood. ''Ciao, Bill!'' they all called, every time he stepped outside. Or so it seemed, on the rare occasions I was on the premises. For months, I ...

Emily, I also agree with the Obama ban on strollers at the inauguration, but not because the crowd needs to be protected from babies (and their means of transportation). Here I am wondering whether it will be safe to take newly minted teenagers into the crowds that day—most parents I know are leaning against it—and toddlers would surely be at ...

Anybody else miss out on the shopping gene? Other people who are not Keira Knightley seem to enjoy it, though. Now that my kids are getting older—they turn 13 in a couple of weeks—they are showing signs that it only skipped a generation, which is how I wound up spending my Friday night at the Montgomery Mall. And seeing for myself what deep ...

John Tagliabue has written a wonderful obit for Paul Hofmann, ''author and foe of Nazis,'' as the headline summing up his life puts it. I knew him a little in Rome, and he was also one of those ageless charmers and know-er of interesting stuff that the world was already way too short on. Great guy, and life so well-lived that ... but no, ...

Well, I end the year with a mea culpa: I should have read the New Republic piece about Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat before piping up to defend him. But even after doing so, I agree most with this part of what one of the scholars who initially questioned the veracity of Rosenblat's memoir said: ''The most tragic part is that [Herman's] ...

Ben, your response to my defense of Herman Rosenblat made me think that maybe my post was itself too inaccessible, so let me be clearer: My point wasn't that films about the Holocaust have been made in other countries, too. (Duh.) It was that the impulse to focus on resistance fighters and the odd righteous Gentile is not just an ...