Meaning, of course, Robert Altman's glorious 1975 film (not the one with Julianne Moore naked, that's Short Cuts, not the one with war, that's M*A*S*H, not the one which is just Downton Abbey, that's Gosford Park.) Look for the shiny new edition in early December.
The glorious Rae Earl on what to do with one's teenage detritus: As a lifelong hypochondriac, I have had a will since I was seven. Its conditions have changed over the years (I don't think my brother wants my Smurf collection any more), but one codicil has remained unchanged since 1989. In the event of my death from a horrific tropical disease or a burst appendix, my best friend Mort must go to my…
Previous installments of This Week in Reading can be found here. This one is just about cookbooks, and not from this past week, which is cheating. There will be two more installments. This list makes no attempt at being exhaustive, and is not ranked: these are the cookbooks I use most in my own kitchen, and recommend to others. Reading cookbooks is a glorious, glorious occupation. If you have only 15 spare minutes, there's…
...mostly based on a week of happily reading The Globe and Mail, Macleans, and watching the ads on CBC. 1. Criticizing a truly stupid and unconstitutional attempt by Quebec to ban government workers from wearing religious symbols (tiny crucifixes? oui! hijab? non). 2. Serving raw pork in fancy restaurants. 3.
In honour of the glorious Lauren Bacall's 89th birthday, let's revisit this perfect Vanity Fair profile from 2011: The apartment is cavernous, on a high floor of the Dakota, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Huge windows overlook Central Park, 30 feet above the tree line, with the grand residential buildings of Fifth Avenue in the distance. My meetings with Lauren Bacall, who is 86, are at three P.M. in the winter, so the light…
On Monday, Mallory told us some wonderful stories from The Bible, and Jasmine told Laura Ingalls' Ma where to stick her china shepherdess. Tuesday, both your area singles and your neighborhood proved unsettling, and we learned a lot from the creator of Tarzan. Wednesday: i have eaten everything that was in the icebox you should probably go to the store again. -wcw…
I'm sure you believe something weird. I'm relatively superstition-free, but I have close friends who are Russians, and some Russians (PLAYFUL STEREOTYPING, YOU ARE A DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE) are basically 13th century doctors in terms of their attachment to semi-magical ways to protect themselves and their loved ones from the vagaries of fate. EXAMPLE: Wishing someone a happy birthday before their actual birthday. Or having a party before their actual birthday. It's out! It's right out.
If you are not familiar with the Emily Books Book Club, or simply have that condition where you struggle to form short-term memories, you may click here. Maybe you already did! This month, Emily and I read and discussed Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding (discount code, as always, at the bottom of the post) and had a tiny fight about Sylvia Plath. Emily - Oh, hello there! Nicole - HI EMILY, this…
1. Eating breakfast helps you lose weight. 2. If you eat breakfast under a sycamore tree, you'll have good luck all year, and a little child will bring you lead things for your fishing rod whenever you need them. 3. If a rhinoceros serves you English muffins, saying "a tiddle taddle, a tiddle taddle, a tiddle taddle oooo" will convince him to give you peanut butter to go with them. The rhinoceros is very…
Okay, you don't care, you just want some cookies. Or you have a kid, and he magically goes to a school that still lets you bring in unpackaged homemade baked goods, but you forgot, and he needs them in the morning, and your oven is broken. Or, if you're me, you're just bad at making cookies in general. Either you use waxed paper when you shouldn't, and they sail off in all directions, or they're…
Roxane Gay (who writes dynamite movie reviews), in her first piece for The Nation, takes on another glaring editorial omission: The Los Angeles Review of Books is most diverse, with 12.9 percent of their review coverage going to books written by writers of color. Bookforum brings in the rear at 8.7 percent and NPR and The New York Review of Books are tied, with 10.7 percent of their coverage going to books written…
After collapsing into a post-baby-travel-day stupor at my mom's house last night (all the Gravol, none of the vomiting!), I found myself "watching television," as opposed to "watching individual shows," which I think is the most salient difference between not-having and having a DVR-like device. If you have a DVR, you record shows and watch them, and if you don't, you're more prone to just trance-ing out and flipping through the channels. NOTE: The Golden…
Previous installments of “This Week in Reading” can be found here. Most recently: Samantha Irby and Tom Kizzia. Before we get into our actual books for the week, I wanted to do a last-minute plug for Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding, which we'll be discussing with Emily Gould on Thursday (discount code below). I'm counting down the minutes until my actual conversation with Emily, because I read it in two sittings…
