Author, Journalist, Pop Folklorist
When I walked into this bathroom this morning and saw the dying cockroach, flailing it’s little feelers and all six legs, that’s when I knew I needed an exorcism. I know what you’re thinking: an exorcism is a bit of an overreaction. Surely some Raid would do the trick? But the cockroach was just the…
Read more about The Metamorphosis in Miami: On Motherhood and “the Mati”
As a folklorist, I often feel that marketing messes with holidays. I don’t want to think about Halloween the day after the fourth of July, but the drugstore and the “seasonal” aisle of the supermarket and the forests worth of catalogs that arrive at my door want me to, because there’s really no big ticket…
Read more about From Pumpkin Spice Latte to Pitaya Juice: An Autumnal Journey
In the last two weeks I’ve been called self-satisfied, low-class, controlling, shallow, sexist, smug, priggish, crazed, repulsive, creepy, trashy, frivolous, provincial, disgusting, and just plain horrible. My crime? I pierced my six-month-old daughter’s ears at the request of my Nicaraguan husband, an experience I wrote about for the nytimes.com‘s “Townies” column. It was fun to…
Amalía and I are in New York, but we brought a little bit of Miami with us. Two little bits actually: the shiny gold studs in Amalía’s tiny ears. Read all about it in the post “Baby’s First Bling”, which I wrote for the Townies column of the Opinionator blog in the New York Times’…
It’s that time of year again–empty beer bottles are sprouting in my garden like so many crocuses, flocks of young chicks in bikini tops and belly rings keep swooping into my neighborhood Starbucks, and, if the boys who have rented the apartment across the courtyard are any indication, young men’s fancy is turning to lust….
More people have seen me topless in the last two months than in my entire life leading up to this point–and I’m including the first five years or so when I ran around many a Greek beach in nothing but a diaper. I came to this realization last week when I opened the door for…
