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Life’s a Beach
Visiting Jones Beach today was like being on a public strand circa the 1950s, the bright beach bags, chairs, umbrellas, suits (except the suits were skimpier, even on the less than skimpy subathers). Families with their chairs drawn around in big circles. Teenagers jumping around, full of beans. Grandpas dozed. Mothers and daughters plunked themselves…
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Pogo Schtick NYC
By the time we arrived, the Big Air finals had ended. Pogopalooza 10 was barreling towards its final couple of hours. None of the participants, it seemed, were tired. They were hardly breaking a sweat. It was as if the 10th Annual World Championships of Extreme Pogo, held in venues around New York City over…
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Lincoln Center Whirl and Twirl
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Portals Into Other Worlds
I’m thinking about how you can visit other times and places on the web, peeking through portals the way you peer through a cutout in the plywood surrounding a construction site. Here are fifteen visits I’ve made lately that I’d recommend. It was a mistake for Rolling Stone to make a rock star out of…
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Rapid Cycling
You’ve heard about the Citi Bikes that now throng Manhattan. There are thousands of them parked in solar-powered docks from Battery Park to Central Park. Anybody with a bank card can rent one for half an hour. (There are some bikes in the outer boroughs, too.) They’re making New York into Minneapolis or Melbourne or…
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Deep Purple
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A Stitch in Time
I keep in storage a box filled with 94 vintage pieces of linen and lace, and an antique silk flowered shawl with long, swaying fringes. All heirlooms, all worked by the matriarchs of the White and Coats families, small-town Tennessee residents. Artists. The women of my family. Who specifically made these creations we can’t be…
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Lowdown on the High Line
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Serene and Green
I wondered how it would work, so I went to find out. A literary event in a clothing store in Yonkers, New York. A literary event that had nothing to do with fashion, actually: Reeve Lindbergh, the author of family memoirs, essays and children’s books, would be reading excerpts from the latest volume of her…
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Links in the Chain
A handful of links for a rainy day. A beautiful look at hand paintings by Moscow-based artist and poet Svetlana Kolosova. Info about the Biblewalk and Living Bible Museum in Mansfield, Ohio. Job appears real! Amazing self-portraits by writers. Henry Miller drew his in 1946. The story of how the Kindle came to be, from…
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The Highest Bidder
“There have been horror films set in storage facilities,” says Gil. “I can only imagine,” says Maud. Gil likes to run the cart through to our storage locker, especially if he’s got Maud for a passenger. We’ve kept about half our belongings in the deep freeze since moving to the Cabin. Too. Much. Stuff. “Every…
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For Art’s Sake
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Out of Africa
Maud is back from Malawi. Wearing a chichinge, a wrap skirt of block-printed African cloth. Her resilient muscles are only a little sore, and she seems impervious to jet lag after 20 hours in the air. Maud and her group from buildOn, working with hundreds of village men, laid a foundation and raised a quarter…
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Meatpacking Amble
We started and ended our Manhattan amble in the Meatpacking District, that venerable neighborhood from around 14th down to Gansevoort Street that has been totally gentrified in recent years. This is a place that in 1900 had 250 slaughterhouses and packing plants lining its streets. The paving stones under the butchers’ awnings used to actually lie…
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Scented Letters