Jed was born and bred in New York City. He's traveled a lot, lived for short periods of time in many different cities, and worked a variety of jobs (Circulation Manager, Bookseller, Foreign Rights Assistant, First Press Editor). Currently he lives in Brooklyn and seeks work as a copyeditor and proofreader. Email: [email protected]
Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, makes a shockingly good living by writing books and newspaper columns about etiquette. She dispenses advice on such things as the best way to discourage troublesome relatives from ruining your wedding, how to acknowledge the embarrassing medical conditions of your friends, and whether or not to invite the…
I am most often described by those who know me as venerable, though I am not particularly old. Sagacious, Solomonic and wise are other frequently used descriptors. Once, a lady who lived above me in a beleaguered section of Oakland, California, and whose business it was to know these things, said that I was a…
Shannon has left me. No, wait. That’s not right. It’s I who’s left her, and I did it a while ago, too. I sit in a drab apartment on the third floor of a complex off vaci Utca (VAHtsy OOtsa) in Budapest. There is fabric on the walls–scored beige, thick and hard as amphibian skin–and…
It’s easy to reduce our political leaders to the sum of their policies, to regard them as no more complex than the glib pronouncements of op/ed contributors. It’s much more difficult to acknowledge the totality of their humanity, to regard them as family men and women, as enthusiasts and hobbyists, individuals of many interests and…
Julia is a bright-eyed girl of 14, with shoulder-length chestnut-brown hair and a winsome smile. One recent July morning, she, along with her 16 year-old sister Jane, drive into downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, in their father’s battered F-150 pick-up truck, on their way to fulfilling a dream. She pulls a damp wad of ten- and twenty-dollar…
There is Quiet Street. On the bus, on our way to play sports on Randalls Island or Wards Island (depending on the season), we cross the first leg of the Triborough Bridge. Before we get to the Triborough, there is Quiet Street. It is 124th, or 126th. Maybe 120th. I can’t remember. The bus turns…
The word derives from the Latin insulatus–made into an island–and it has a nasty sense to it, or so goes conventional thinking. Among its associations: disease, betrayal, failure, separation. It is the fate of the disgraced ruler (Napoleon’s sentence, true to the word’s root), the madman (isolated even from his own limbs by the fastening…
On May 29, 1983, Steve Howe, a 25 year-old relief pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, checked himself into a drug rehabilitation center to treat an addiction to cocaine. Howe was a promising young star, 1980’s rookie of the year, and endowed with the hyperactive, pugnacious demeanor of a natural-born “closer,” the pitcher charged with…
They say that spring is the season of love, and they may be right. April’s days may be soaked in the hormones and pheromones of a renewed reproductive cycle, and in this we are undoubtedly biology’s sensual puppets. But let us firmly agree that we will have no truck with biology here. On the streets…