March 7, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Prince of Tides By Sadie Stein From the cover of The Pat Conroy Cookbook. I never met Pat Conroy, but he was a frequent companion at our family dinner table. Since his death last week, everyone who knew him has talked a lot about his generosity, his sense of fun, his menschiness. I knew him as a cook. Read More
March 4, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Taxicab Confessions By Sadie Stein Romina Diaz-Brarda, New York Cabs. I took a taxi to an appointment lately and the driver was very talkative. I learned all about his life, his early baseball prospects, his divorce, his daughter, his newborn grandson. He hoped to teach the child to play baseball, which got us on the subject of baseball. He was a Yankee fan, and especially loved Alex Rodriguez. Read More
March 3, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Queen Bee By Sadie Stein An ad for French honey. Yesterday I had one of those moments of everyday wonder that helps tint a life. I’m still not sure where it came from, exactly. I was getting a stirrer for my tea at a downtown coffee shop—no place fancy or very expensive—and there alongside the sugar and the milk and the napkins were the little packets of honey. Packets of honey! Suddenly I thought, Wow! Honey is made by bees! It was found in the pharaohs’ tombs! And here it is being given away for the price of a cup of water. I realize strict vegans must think about this all the time, and maybe it’s no more extraordinary than the ready availability of salt and pepper, once prized and fought over; or sugar, with its fraught history; or, for that matter, water itself. And yet, it was the honey that struck me. You never know what will jump out for you. (Somehow the fax machine has always remained the most wondrous piece of technology to me, more like Wonka Vision than anything more modern.) Read More
March 2, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Bookstore Creeps By Sadie Stein From the cover of Robert Kyle’s The Crooked City, a pulp novel. I love bookstores, but there’s something that needs to be said: they’re often filled with lurking creeps. True, creeps lurk everywhere, certainly in New York City, and true, bookstores are also filled with wonderful people who love to read and are interested in things other than making strangers uncomfortable. This should go without saying. But just as a book gives an aspiring interlocutor a better opening than an inscrutable mobile device—“Are you a student?” “What are you reading?” “Is that a novel of old Paris?” (granted this last was an isolated situation)—so, too, does the tangible presence of large numbers of books embolden a certain subset. Read More
March 1, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Plastic Presidents By Sadie Stein The Marx Presidents. Growing up, our house was filled with presidents and almost presidents. WIN WITH WILLKIE! blared a sign on our front door. Wilson, having “kept us out of war,” looked down benevolently as you mounted the stairs. At the top, you might be confronted with a Nixon caricature and a poster for Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose ticket. And that’s to say nothing of the large case of assorted campaign buttons in the living room, or the cedar closet that had been completely given over to posters, terrifying rubber LBJ and Reagan masks, and other such ephemera. Read More
February 29, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Leap Year By Sadie Stein Another leap year in another time. Before Sadie was a baby name or even a dog name, hearing it would elicit one of two responses: singing (either “Sexy Sadie” or “Sadie Sadie, married lady”) or references to Sadie Hawkins. Since for most of my childhood I had pretensions to neither man-hungry spinsterhood, sexiness, nor marriage, I found all of these references obscurely humiliating. Sadie Hawkins Day—which falls on February 29 and only on February 29—was the worst one. All those desperate old maids chasing after unwilling mediocre men once every four years struck me as deeply troubling, not unlike Ginnifer Goodwin’s character in He’s Just Not That Into You, which is not to be confused with the equally execrable Leap Year. Why did they want them so much? Why were the guys so reluctant? Why was this one day considered so unnatural? Read More