Millionaire Matchmaker. Season Two. Bravo.

Five years ago, when my grandfather could still walk around, he and my grandmother would drive into the city some Sunday mornings and meet me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They would wait for me—I was late, inevitably—in the lobby, near the lavish bouquets that some particularly impractical philanthropist had caused to perpetually bloom there. I would spot them there and, for some reason, stop and stare at them for a moment before they saw me and try to imagine what I'd think of them if I wasn't their grandchild.

Nana always wore a silk-scarf headband and lavish makeup. Poppy wore a polo sweater and neatly pressed, almost hipsterishly slouchy chinos. They would see me and advance, grinning, and my grandmother would press a little aluminum Met admission button into my palm that I would punch onto the edge of my jeans pocket, and then we would wobble slowly through one of the entranceways, clutching each other's hands.

I would have figured them, especially given the setting, for rich people, which was of course the point. Read More

Subj: politics 1
Date: 10/17/2004 6:21:22 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: rothcomar@gmail.com
To: editors@nplusonemag.com
Sent from the Internet (Details)

Dear eds,

To parody an ad for John Kerry, there are many reasons to be pessimistic about the future of America, and one of them is that election day is coming and the Republicans still have a chance to win. In a sane world, this race would not even be close. What is it like to live in the days before a disaster? History provides examples, but none are just right. What was it like to be a Roman citizen hanging out at the garum shop when Caligula purged the Senate? Was that you strolling with careful elegance in Unter den Linden mocking the Bavarian brownshirts? Or you, writing poems when the one-eyed General crossed from Morocco? Or waiting for your husband to come home from the Santiago factories in 1972? People are even starting to come up with names for what we're living through, names like Sheldon Wolin's "inverted totalitarianism," but these still rely on European models. The coming disaster will be all-American, red, white, and blue, and be ours alone. History gives us our unique lives and our unique chance to screw up. Read More