Catherine Rampell

Doug Emhoff has been called many things in recent years: Second Gentleman. "Goofy dad." "Crappy Jew." But perhaps his most appropriate title: Progressive Sex Symbol.

Move over, Ryan Gosling. The modern female fantasy is embodied by the man who might soon become our first First Gentleman. Emhoff appears to be a genuine mensch with an impressive career. He's smitten with his wife and supports her ambitions, as is obvious from his convention speech and their sweet interactions on the campaign trail. But most important for this sexy sobriquet: Emhoff is secure enough with his own masculinity to sometimes prioritize his wife's ambitions over his own.

What. A. Hunk.

...

As Emhoff once told a South Korean newspaper: "Lifting women up so that they can carry out important roles is a very manly thing."

...

What do women want? To be valued and supported as much as they deserve, both privately and in public. On that score, Emhoff looks like a dreamboat.

--Rampell, Catherine. "Doug Emhoff, modern-day sex symbol," The Washington Post, August 23, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/23/emhoff-harris-sex-symbol/.

Glynnis MacNicol

Amazingly, it took me some time to realize the reason I loved Phryne [Fisher of Miss Fisher's Mysteries] and continually returned to her, was not just the exquisite clothes, or the perfect Louise Brooks hair, or the fact that no matter how many times I watched an episode I could never remember the plot and so it always somehow seemed new. It was because she was a grown-up. She was not getting married. She was not having children ("I don't understand the appeal," she likes to say). Her power was not in her potential to be matched up. Her power was her. Full stop. It was so satisfying. 

I think often about how the best stories we have about women outside of marriage and motherhood are almost always about women detectives. Their lives alone, literally and figuratively, are not enough to support what we understand as narrative, and so the most basic, most recognizable narrative is attached to them: whodunnit. In this extremely formalized structure, they are allowed to float along, being messy, or complicated, or elderly, or fashionable. We understand their purpose. Phryne’s real purpose, of course, is to live well, and love well, and do exactly what she pleases. 

 I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself (2024), p. 145-6.

Jon Lovett

Republicans are fucking weird. I love this direction. If there's one thing this country hates, it's weird shit. We like Taylor Swift, generic sports bars, wooden signs in the kitchen that say EAT, mid-century modern Pinterest boards, and weddings that look like all the other weddings. One day, we'll break out of that. But for now, Republicans are fucking weird.

—on the direction of Kamala Harris's campaign, one week after she became the de facto nominee for president. Podcast "What A Weekday," July 30, 2024. 

Glynnis MacNicol

I do think that enjoyment is built into the French system as a right. Whereas in America it has to be earned. And not just earned financially, but earned through labor, through hard work. There's this sense in America you must do something to deserve pleasure, as opposed to you deserve it because you live on planet earth.

https://bonjour.lindseytramuta.com/p/paris-as-a-playground-of-pleasure

Glynnis MacNicol

I couldn't shake the feeling that the years ahead, if they were to be lived in a way that didn't leave me feeling like I was standing in a corner watching the action but never living it, would require me to transform into a person I could not yet recognize and was not totally convinced even existed.

No One Tells You This (2018)

NEH

Him: Why are you laughing?

Me: I'm just laughing at us. I don't want to get old, but I can see how it's going to be. I have to laugh. 

Him: Well, the good news is you're stuck with me. My quirks are only going to get quirkier, so buckle up. 

Heidi Waldorf, MD

About skincare products and supplements in particular. 

But [Heidi] Waldorf hits the bull’s-eye: “Realistic expectations are key. From a long-term and cost-benefit perspective, a gentle non-soap cleanser, moisturizer, prescription retinoid, and sunscreen, with or without an over-the-counter, science-based anti-aging topical cosmeceutical (for example, peptides or antioxidants), will do more for you than a supplement and for less money.”

https://www.thecut.com/article/will-hyaluronic-acid-supplements-help-my-skin.html

Editor's comment: Most skincare products are bullshit. Stick with the basics and drink lots of water. As for the retinoid, my dermatologist recommends Differin gel, available OTC - no prescription needed. I use it every other day so a little tube lasts for quite a long time.

Olivia Waite

Excerpts from "Love Notes," New York Times romance book review column (3/3/24).

Review of Second Chances in New Port Stephen by TJ Alexander. 

"This is as low-concept a book as you can get, but it works for the same reason books by Cat Sebastian, Rebekah Weatherspoon and Jackie Lau work: you enjoy spending time with these people and you want them to reach for joy when they can. We all should.

It's the difference between saving the world and saving one another. The former can feel impossible; the second we can do every day."

Review of When Grumpy Met Sunshine by Charlotte Stein

"Alfie's Roy Kent-inspired voice is a triumph—and very, very funny—but sex is where Stein really shines. This, children, is how the professionals do it. Not a rote list of parts and positions, but a physical flow between two people. It's the difference between seeing choreography laid out and footprints on the floor, and being swept away by the dance."

Sue Poole

As I've gotten older, my style has grown bolder. I'm always telling my kids, 'You don't have to conform to trends,' because it's really just a marketer's tool, isn't it, the trend? I wish I had known earlier to follow the beat of my own drum.

https://cupofjo.com/2023/05/04/sue-poole-style/

Calvin (a.k.a. Bill Watterson)

 Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. That's the one thing we know for sure in this world. 

But I'm still going to gripe about it. 

Calvin and Hobbes, Monday, July 17, 1995.

Ligaya Mishan

In a profile about Annette Bening:

While in high school, Bening did some secretarial work for her father, who was teaching classes on Dale Carnegie’s principles of salesmanship. Foremost among them: being interested in other people. The key is not faking it. You have to genuinely care.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/19/t-magazine/annette-bening-nyad-netflix.html

Kim France

Ms. France distilled the key to their quick-to-ignite but enduring love this way: "The reason it works is we both think we're the one who got lucky."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/style/kim-france-paul-green-wedding.html

Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Q [Library Journal]: Compared to your process for writing fiction and nonfiction, what was different writing the memoir?
A [Viet Thanh Nguyen]: My nonfiction has been scholarly, and there is little benefit to being vulnerable, emotional, or subjective in scholarship. To survive in the academy, I had to tamp down any signs of vulnerability or emotion and to present myself purely as a rational, objective, theoretical intellect. No body, no feeling, only highly controlled thought. For a woman, or a person of color, to do any less is to open oneself to the colonizing, racist, sexist assumption that feeling is less than thought, body is less than mind, spirit is less than intellect. So I had to undo a lifetime of Westernized education to allow myself to write a memoir.

--In an interview about the author's forthcoming book A Man of Two Faces, due for publication in October 2023.

Dr. Janina Fisher

If it's not happening now, it's not happening.