Have you ever heard a posh British person describe their car, the “JEGG-oo-ah”? “Lahnd Wover” is another good one.

This story might be an urban legend but I’m almost sure I read it somewhere, maybe in the New York Observer, during the height of the anti-fur protests in the 90s.

Or like something out of one of Nancy Mitford’s novels. I still remember a line spoken by the patriarch in one: “Abroad is unutterably bloody.”

The woman watching in the Christine O’Donnell video looks an awful lot like Anna the ladies’ maid from Downton Abbey. Remember when Downton gets a radio and the entire household, upstairs and downstairs, gathers around to hear The King’s Speech? If only George V had said something like, “And I want to assure my loyal…

You can read every issue of Spy for free on Google books.

Kennedy and Clinton were no slouches.

I have a huge hound who is a master at side-eye. I am constantly under the impression that I have spinach on my teeth or I’ve just said something wildly inappropriate. He’s giving me side-eye as I type this.

At least he (or, let’s be real, one of his staffers) remembered his anniversary. More than I’m capable of.

I watched Bridesmaids and didn’t crack a smile. Then we had people staying with us and they wanted to see it so I watched again and loved it. I was sober both times so I don’t know what caused this change of heart.

When we were looking to buy an apartment we saw an ancient co-op that had plaster walls. They had really restrictive rules and one was that you couldn’t cover the walls with sheetrock. I don’t know how enforceable that would be but nothing would surprise me about NYC co-ops and their insane rules. The owners were…

I was a teenager in the 1970s with one phone in the house, one line, no call waiting, and a sister who talked to her girlfriends from the minute she arrived home from school until bedtime. My buddies were in similar circumstances. We used to have to make plans in homeroom and stick to them if we ever wanted to see…

Were your family members Junkers? You’re German aren’t you, so you know what a Junker is? Did the estate get swallowed up when they re-created Poland after WWI?

At least British class comes with centuries of tradition, or at least practices from the Victorian era, and loads of eccentricity, and substance abuse, and funny ways of speaking the wang-widge. In America we have Trump. And Mark Zuckerberg. And the Kardashians.

Public libraries used to have vast archives of old magazines (they would start subscribing when they were built and never throw any of them away) and I spent many an afternoon paging through random back issues of Time and Life magazines. The news was interesting enough but I mostly read them for the movie and theater…

Oh God. Some of my relatives live in New England and have a pellet stove (for heating, not for cooking) and that’s bad enough.

Only if they make Andy Cohen go too.

Have you ever seen “Little Britain”? There are two recurring characters who are billed as The Least Convincing Transvestites. Not only are they very obviously men dressing as women, they dress in Edwardian clothing and act like it’s 1905. Like the couple in the GQ article they too ride high wheel bikes.

They made a one-legged man operate a foot-powered machine? That’s...if he was unskilled, why didn’t they let him be a rag picker, or one of the guys who dredged rivers looking for whatever someone might have tossed in or lost, or a street sweeper cleaning up after horses?

This is a really wonderful (and horrifying) book. It’s fairly short but it has tons of illustrations and manages to pack in a lot of good information.

I visited my grandmother in the hospital in 1981. The first time I went I had to hang out in the waiting area while they settled her into her room. EVERYONE was smoking (the stress I guess.) A nice middle-aged woman noticed I wasn’t and held out her pack for me. I was 16 and had just gotten my license.