This could only happen in New York. — Cutthroat as you may think New Yorker’s are, there’s one arena where their ambitions are at their most exaggerated. Dog adoption. When I landed there in 2007, fresh on the heels of divorce, I had no idea competitive dog rescue was a thing. And god help me if I ever…

And this is how they’re selling it As someone who had two screws the size of my HAND drilled into my knee to “heal” a broken bone—and then spent two years trying to get it out and only prevailed thanks to a separate procedure—I am all about healthcare research that takes into account the needs of actual…

How insulated must someone be to believe babies are being saved? — The Supreme Court is finally poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the law that gave women the right to healthcare without undue governmental restriction. One of the Court’s the most widely-contested decisions, I’ve never understood the arguments. Just how is it that Republicans can love this particular governance—enforcing motherhood—and have…

And my friend had no idea. Dry January Addiction Chronicles, Part 1. My friend Mara and I were huddled over menus in an East Village Thai place barely wider than a doorway, deep in conversation about an ex of hers that pre-dated our friendship. She’d just returned from visiting him at a state-run hospital in New Jersey, where he’d been diagnosed with…

But does she need to be redeemed? — There’s nostalgia, there’s living in the past, and then there’s And Just Like That… This season, Carrie digs into the wayback machine and finds that the only possible man for her is her ex, Aidan. Carrie, I beg you, snap out of whatever rabbit hole you fell into. That man…

America Ferrara’s pep talk didn’t get beyond “never get old,” so I wrote a coda. — It is literally impossible to age. Just when you think it’s safe to let your grays show, every character on And Just Like That… reverts to their Sex And The City-era hair and high heels. …

If not people in recovery, then who? — When I first got clean at 19 — a Gen Xer, I started chugging booze I stole from the people I babysat for at age 10 — I never questioned whether I was an addict. I was also sure I’d never drink again, so long as I did what they…

Takes me back to living in an Islamic regime — Recently, I shared a story I wrote about Gwyneth Paltrow’s pandemic-era reality show, Sex, Love & goop. Only, the video I’d included for its thumbnail illustration—the picture above showing a man standing over a woman who’s laying down, blindfoldead—was blacked out. Its ominous warning tag read, “this video is age-restricted…

Contains massive spoilers so do not read if you’ve been watching Succession because you care about who actually takes over. — Truth be told, I never cared about the underlying plot in Succession. After the first season, it was pretty clear that the family patriarch didn’t trust any of his children with his job. With good reason, but still, whether they answered the question was secondary to watching how horrible and…