• 400 Noodles and Four Hours: Monday, February 19

    400 Noodles and Four Hours: Monday, February 19

    I knew it was coming, so I’d had a couple days to brace myself. Mostly, my strategy was to hide upstairs, answer the occasional question, and deliberately pour my soul into a zen acceptance of chaos. Actually, now that I reread that previous sentence, I think I might ask Byron to stitch a version of […]

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  • Eight in Some: Sunday, February 18

    Eight in Some: Sunday, February 18

    A prompt for today’s post: Recently, the chief curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City rejected the White House’s request to loan Vincent van Gogh’s Landscape With Snow painting, instead offering to lend Maurizio Cattelan’s functional, solid gold toilet sculpture titled America. If you could borrow any work of art from a museum […]

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  • Seven in Fifty-One: Saturday, February 17

    Seven in Fifty-One: Saturday, February 17

    This afternoon, Allegra, friend Linda, and I drove through several flat, soul-sucking towns, braving the border of Wisconsin, so that we could participate in a race across a frozen bay in Lake Superior. Approximately 4,000 skiers, snowshoers, and runners take part each year in this night-time race, lit only by luminaries and the frigid tears […]

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  • Seven GIFs in Five: Friday, February 16

    Seven GIFs in Five: Friday, February 16

    “There’s something about her face that makes her seem a little evil,” I told Byron as Aliona Savchenko and Bruno Massot glided onto the ice, readying themselves for their freeskate. “Don’t get me wrong: I love her nose and chin; they work together in a way that’s really arresting. But in my casting, I can’t […]

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  • Six in Five: Thursday, February 15

    Six in Five: Thursday, February 15

    Practical Uses for Jessie Diggins’ Potent Positivity 1. We could plug her into a power grid and have her light up Manhattan 2. We could seat her next to people suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder and watch their spirits rise as her radiance seeps into their cells 3. We could plant her in the DMZ […]

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  • Five Waxed Peeves

    Five Waxed Peeves

    Things that Peeved Me about the Cross-Country Skiing Men’s Classic Sprint Race on the Olympics Last Night: 1. I’ll never be the sprint specialist from Switzerland. 2. There was no outlier competitor from Jamaica with Coke-bottle thick glasses for the world to get sentimental about. 3. No one took the opportunity at the starting line […]

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  • Six in Five: Tuesday, February 13

    Six in Five: Tuesday, February 13

    Unfunny comedians alive in the 1970s who shaped my sense of what was “funny” to a troubling extent simply because they were on Hollywood Squares, and the tv in our house was rarely turned off:              

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  • Thirty-Three in Eleven: Monday, February 12

    Thirty-Three in Eleven: Monday, February 12

    Things the Fully Dressed Lady in the Sauna Did During Her 90-Second Visit: 1. Looked startled when I said, “If you want the light on, we can turn it back on. I just turned it off, but it’s no big deal to me either way” 2. Assured me it was fine to leave the light […]

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  • Five in Five: Sunday, February 11

    Five in Five: Sunday, February 11

      A recap, in case you missed the live coverage.

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  • Five in Five: Saturday, February 10

    Five in Five: Saturday, February 10

    Neighbors I Never Really Knew: 1. In the fall of 1987, I did a semester in Dublin with my two best friends from college, Colleen and Guppie; we rented a flat together in the Sandymount suburb of the city. We had the downstairs, and above us lived two Asian tenants, a male and a female, […]

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