April 18, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Cheese Guy By Sadie Stein From a 1930 Italian cheese advertisement. I used to like buying cheese. You could say it was one of the small, reliable pleasures of my week. I never bought a great deal—usually just a small piece to eat for lunch with some bread and fruit—but I enjoyed the process of tasting and learning and then bearing home the neatly wrapped little waxed-paper bundle. The cheese guy was nice, too. Knowledgeable without making a big show of it, authoritative without snobbery, and pleasantly detached. It was this detachment, in a way, that allowed me to enjoy the transaction—he never made a big fuss about my being a regular. I felt slightly invisible, but in the best possible way. It would have been awkward if he’d been flirtatious or overly friendly. And he never made me try more cheeses than I wanted, which I thought was nice. Read More
April 15, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Song Stuck in My Head By Sadie Stein Life is but a day: A fragile dewdrop on its perilious way From a tree’s summit —John Keats Last night I heard the singer-songwriter Emmy the Great cover “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.” It was beautiful. That song is one that lends itself to covers: resolutely gorgeous, flexible enough to allow for interpretation, but always essentially itself. Whether it’s Cat Power, Richard Thompson, Eva Cassidy, or the cast of Pretty Little Liars singing the ballad, the mix of melancholy reflection and bursts of pure feeling can never be less than stunning. (Okay, maybe the Pretty Little Liars version doesn’t quite get there.) Read More
April 14, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Simply Charmin’ By Sadie Stein Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams. ―James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Volume 1 The voice actor Arthur Anderson has died at the age of ninety-three. Although he enjoyed a long and varied career as a working actor, the Staten Island–born Anderson was probably best known for voicing Lucky, the perennially bereft Lucky Charms leprechaun. He said in a 2005 interview, “It was a fun character to play. Hardly a day goes by when somebody doesn’t ask me to sing the Lucky Charms jingle, and I’m proud of that.” Read More
April 13, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Little Match Girl By Sadie Stein A nineteenth-century illustration for The Little Match Girl. The first time I remember lying about why I was crying was in second grade. I’d burst out sobbing in the middle of social studies and, rather than admit I’d been thinking about the plot of “The Little Match Girl,” I claimed vaguely that there was some problem at home, prompting a humiliating private lunch with my teacher and a parent-teacher conference. You’d think that would have cured me. But being upset about nothing is galling. It’s hard to explain to a stranger on the subway that no, tears are actually rolling down your cheeks because of an episode of The People v. O. J. Simpson, or a piece of music you’re not even listening to. Read More
April 12, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Fifteen By Sadie Stein From the cover of a seventies edition of Fifteen. Beverly Cleary has turned one hundred. And while there’s no shortage of well-deserved and lovely tributes out there, I wanted to take a moment to talk about one of my favorite of her books: Fifteen, a YA novel published in 1956. Like all of Cleary’s work, it combines gentle observational humor with a genuine understanding of young people. And like the rest of her oeuvre, it holds up, even decades down the line. Read More
April 11, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Always Right By Sadie Stein New York City subway, May 1973. The other day I noticed something for the first time. “Please allow all customers off the train,” said the recorded voice over the subway sound system. Customers. Not passengers, not riders: customers. What did it mean? Something bureaucratic, obviously—but philosophically? Had the transaction at last been stripped of all artifice? Had the civic connotations of public transit been cast off in favor of naked commercialism? Or was this a simple acknowledgment that we’re paying for the ride—and that, in the way of all American customers, we are always right? Read More