The other day, my Welsh springer spaniel, Cooper, gave me a manicure. He doesn't give the world's best manicure -- for that you'd have to go to that Korean joint, Nuclear Nails, or whatever it's called, on Broadway -- but he really tries. He can tell whether I'm in the mood ...

I want to make a confession: I am passionately and uncontrollably in love with Dick Cheney. Lynne, I'm sorry; if I could help it I would. It's just something about him--the strength, the silence, the frank and unabashed baldness, the mystery, the unknowability, the man, the ...

On January 27, 1999, a tiger went walking through the town of Jackson, New Jersey. According to the zoology guidebook Wild Cats, a tiger’s natural requirements are “some form of dense vegetative cover, sufficient large ungulate prey, and access to water”. By those measures, ...

When my grandmother died a few years ago, I was given her formal china, her silverware, a fur-lined lap robe, and her Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition – an old brick of a book, leather-bound, with skin-thin pages and black half-...

One recent sultry afternoon, inside the Bridgewater Commons mall, in central New Jersey, across from The Limited, down the hall from a Starbucks, next door to the Colorado Pen Company, and just below Everything Yogurt, a woman named Glenda Parker was making a priceless famil...

Nothing says springtime quite so much as a romp around Paris in your underpants. Pitchers and catchers may have reported to spring training; tax day might have come and gone; but nothing celebrates the vernal equinox like whipping off your fleece-lined Uggs and wool-blend tr...

All languages are welcome on Bangkok's Khao San Road, including Drunkard. "Hold my hand," a man fluent in Singapore Slings commanded a Scottish hairdresser one night at Lucky Beer and Guest House-only in his dialect it came out soggy and rounded, more like Hole mah han. "Not...

When I went to Scotland for a friend's wedding last summer, I didn't plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course; but I didn't expect to shoot or get shot at. The wedding was taking place in a medieval cas...

THINGS I WONDER(2:12) Depending on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or the worst. Frank Zappa is said to have proclaimed that the Shaggs were "better than the Beatles." More recently, though, a music fan who claimed to be in "the fetal position...

Jill Meilus is a New York City real-estate broker. Like Superman, she can see through walls. Walking down a Manhattan street with her is a paranormal experience. "Nice building," you might remark as you pass a handsome but unrevealing prewar facade, to which she might respon...

When I was in junior high school, we spent the whole summer at the pool. The coolest kids had tans in May; I don't know how they did it. In 1971, when I was fourteen, there was a kind of bikini that was the absolute butter -- a little something held together at the hips and ...

I grew up in the sixties and seventies, under the spell of the old television show "Bewitched." I saw every episode, and I loved them all. But lately I have been watching the television show "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch," and I have come to regret that I was fifteen in the "B...

John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. He is...

I. BIRTH As the piece opens, another performance artist, "Mom" (an affiliate of my private funding source) waits onstage, consuming tuna-noodle casseroles. Eventually, she leaves the initial performance site-a single-family Cape Cod decorated with amoeboid sofas, Herman M...