Feeling appreciated for the work you do is so soul-satisfying. Reader, did you marry him?

New York actually kind of leads the way in a lot of things, especially concerning public behavior (I guess because we’re all so crowded in together.) I believe the first American city, or at least the first big city, to outright ban smoking in bars (in bars!) was New York, and I believe the bike lane movement was…

Because my acquisition of pop culture stopped about the time “Don’t Dream It’s Over” first came out I had to read the headline three times to realize that it wasn’t Jann Wenner who was doing covers…

Oh, my coworkers are going to be happy to see me when I show up bearing this little treat. As if the ability to wear jeans on Fridays weren’t enough reason to celebrate the start of the weekend!

I will file a report from Team Dog HQ to try to address this imbalance.

I just love the fact that there is a pizza chain called Boston Pizza. That would be like having a French restaurant chain called “Krakow du Jour.” I’ll give away the secret recipe for pizza in Boston: Thomas’ English muffin, ketchup, and Kraft American singles. Microwave on high for 45 minutes. Mangiamo!

As I understand it a Barrister is different from a Solicitor. I think one can argue cases in a courtroom and one cannot. Also one can pinch hit as a judge and one cannot. Tony Blair’s wife Cherie has served as a judge, which must be a terrifying thought to all citizens of the UK.

He published a lot of trash in his lifetime. Not as bad as Doubleday, which used to employ Jackie Onassis and is now part of RH, but close enough.

It happens to men, too, if that makes you feel any better. I first rode when I was about five years old and I came off the horse and said to my parents, “my pee pee hurts, I think I need to go to the bathroom?” It was my pre-puberty erection.

I’ll reply to you rather than crazier ‘n you.

Can I ask why everyone is telling you to go to Culver City? Do you need to be by LAX for some reason? Buying in LA is ridiculously expensive but if you’re renting, especially coming from NYC, SoCal is a paradise. Your work location (and that determines a lot of my friends’ housing decisions) is the key factor. A lot…

Second Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything, and I also have his The Best Recipes In The World. I’m also signed up for his recipe updates. You can go here:

You might want to read Anthony Marra’s “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.” It takes place in Chechnya, and one of the settings is a hospital, not a university, but there are bombings and bloodshed galore. A really beautifully written book, and quite funny (!) in some of the sections.

I’ll bite, as it were. As I was being wheeled into the operating room under really heavy sedation (I had mine done in a hospital) the doctor asked me to start counting backward from 100 by three’s. So “100, 97, 94, 91…I love you…” Apparently this is not uncommon, but my mother was there and it was amusing/horrifying…

Thank you. My husband’s parents shielded him from a lot of this. We watched a documentary and it showed firehoses and dogs being used against black children and he professed astonishment, although he grew up in one of the most racist cities in America (Boston). No dogs and no firehoses but plenty of housewives…

One day I would like to have a ceremony to celebrate my gay white self’s betrothal to a black man. We went to the City Clerk’s Office in NYC early on a Thursday morning and then both went to work. So we eloped, kind of. I wonder if Rachel Dolezal, aside from her painting and Africana Studies and NAACP duties and…

It’s by far the most successful trilogy Random House has ever published, and they publish George R. R. “Game of Thrones” Martin (and Ann Coulter, for what it’s worth, and she does really well for them too.) I’m sure Bennett Cerf is looking down from Heaven and smiling.

It’s not fun, because you shouldn’t really go through the front gate, where the plaque is. And having written several paragraphs on the John Philip Sousa home I curse auto-correct for making that into Souza, which is the last name of a person I worked with almost a decade ago.

Have you been to John Philip Souza’s house in DC? It’s a private residence, and the current owners don’t welcome visitors, to put it mildly, but I had to write about it once. You have to go up a flight of stairs just to get to the front door and ring the doorbell so that deters a lot of people. There’s a little plaque…

THERE YOU ARE! I’ve missed you. How is your summer going?