Ted Cruz comes from an interesting lineage. His father was born in Cuba and fled to Texas, not at the hands of a bloodthirsty mob of Castro Communist revolutionaries, but just the opposite: because he supported the revolution and was brutalized by the Batista regime. Then Dad got religion and was/is an itinerant…

Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! was really good too. And Joan Didion’s Miami, although it’s a little dated now. The thesis was that if we didn’t stop screwing around in Nicaragua when it was written, in the 1980s, it would turn out to be what Cuba was to the US in the 50s/60s, but most of the book is a really interesting…

Not a chance. This is a huge family that believes having a child at 13 is “God’s Blessing” and a $4 pork loin is worth fighting over in a crappy supermarket. Good luck to them. They are not exactly “The Talented Tenth.” I got the best one, and they all know it.

My husband used to be an easy mark for his large, extended family. Second cousins twice-removed whom he barely knew would hit him up for strange amounts, like $82 to cover an overdue electric bill. Yet they knew enough about him, through family talk I guess, that he had a good job and lived in Manhattan. He got burned…

Controlling natural resources and being granted lucrative telecoms licenses from shady regimes is one way to make a lot of money. Another is the way that Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did: by creating something new that people find indispensable and making them pay for it, or profiting off it somehow.…

The first time I ever saw the word latinx in print (five or so years later I still have never heard it pronounced or used in conversation) I had just gotten back from a spell in Barcelona, and for some reason I thought it was Catalan. So la-tinsh it will always be to me, even though I don’t think Catalan has words…

I bet that’s where Hermès got the idea for the Birkin bag.

Just wait until Egyptian hieroglyphic emojis become common and we’re all slapped in the face with misinterpreted Nefertiti quotes.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair, I thought you were dead! Welcome back.

Can I ask how you’re able to read gray comments? My only options are to not hit Show Pending, so I can read all the black comments, because I get the Show More Replies option, or hit Show Pending”, in which case I only get the first five comments, some of which are sometimes gray. This has been going on for me and…

They should have a few left over from when the Boers started wandering the veldt, killing everyone and everything in sight.

She’ll probably go on to be a political news analyst for the next few decades, eventually sailing into Peggy Noonan territory.

+1 Day of Infamy speech for you!

We used to have food drives at work and people would do this. Clear out the cabinets and donate all the crap they didn’t want. I, childless, would trek to the baby food aisle of my local supermarket and buy up dozens of those little jars, because the food pantries never have enough baby food. Plus I’d be embarrassed…

“That’s what a woman’s breasts look like?!?!”

My husband sometimes testifies before a Congressional Committee when they want industry input on a bill they’re considering.

That’s interesting. I can’t speak any Asian languages but I’ve been working with native speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese (and probably a couple of the less common languages) for decades, and I’ve never heard the r/l misplaced pronunciation. I always wondered where that stereotype came from.

At least twice a week I walk by the Red Lobster on 125 Street next to the Apollo in Harlem but I’ve never been in there or any Red Lobster. This one:

I actually googled Starlene Holloway and no such person exists, at least not as far as google could find, and they can find everyone. There is a prime Starlene candidate but it’s possibly/probably not her so I won’t tar a potentially innocent person by divulging the results of my research.

Starlene Holloway sounds like a John Waters character.