What Would Phoebe Do?

I've just streamlined what I'm bringing to Israel. One book on Zionism, not two. One possibly non-working European (aka correct-plug...

Very soon, I will be bli machshev, bli (working) pelephone, and bli gvinah tsarfatit, the mainstays of my life here in the States. Although ...

I was about to respond to two different posts in two different posts, then realized that they're on much the same topic: should the pers...

Masafumi Yamamoto for The New York Times Poor dachshunds! It's horrible that the fabulous little dogs of Japan are so inbred that they ...

Does the fact that (hundreds of) trip photos go online for all to see mean that I should, contrary to my impulse, bother purchasing an adapt...

This picture from Gawker is awesome. Who cares about socialite rank--I want a scarf that says Maltz Maltz!

And the celebrations continue. The NYUers, ex-Stuyvesantians and company had some Vietnamese food in Chinatown, then drinks on the Lower Eas...

Last night I ended up at the "Heeb" festivus party , for lack of a better way of describing it, with Jewlicious , etc. There will ...

Of all places in this huge and rainy world of ours, among the least heterocentric ought to be New York's West Village. And yet... When I...

In only a matter of time, I will be exercising my birthright. Not the right to return--I intend to return to New York after a ten-day "...

Who are "singles"? NYU is hosting an event for Jewish "singles," complete with speed-dating, and facebook suggests that...

At 9:30 am tomorrow I will handwrite for 2 1/2 hours on 19th century French history. Coffee and similar would help with the studying, but no...

One final out of four is done, and our professor just assured us that none of us did badly enough on it to be thrown out of the program. Tha...

Various factors, not the least of which is finals, have led to a bit of a lapse in blogging. Now the sitemeter informs me my only visitors a...

My big fuss about Dunkin Donuts's linguistic mishaps brings up the point that Euro McDonalds alternative, despite being Belgian (and W...

I feel like this was a discussion in the blogosphere I took part in a while ago, but I'm too tired/busy/bored to find it in the archives...

Yes it is .

The difference between being a French Studies graduate student and whatever it is you do for a living is that I just came back to the buildi...

Having found a way to make a paper about early 18th century France somehow about Jewish nationalism, it's probably time to call it a nig...

I've got to love any article that begins like this: "There’s a case to be made that the single most intellectually and politically...

"But the seeds of anti-Semitic sentiment were planted in rural communities where no Jews existed, let alone Jewish usurers, by the Chur...

There's a problem with the new Dunkin Donuts commercial. It begins with a sort of musical number, all these people are in a coffee bar, ...

It's official. Second only to astrophysics (shout-out to Kei et al!), poetry is beyond my comprehension. Prose of all kinds, fiction, ...

NYU versus Chicago. What can I say, I'm a New Yorker. That, and the fact that I'm a reasonable person, mean I prefer New York as a c...

I'm an idiot. This week's French Studies luncheon--typically a scholar comes in to lecture after we all consume a sandwich or pizza ...

Last year at some phttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifoint, I had an especially bad meal at a Moroccan restaurant overlooking the Brookly...

I'm to present an explication de texte on Thursday. In researching the poem's historical background, I discover that, according to ...

High: Found the dress. Assuming Canadian designers ship to the States, I'm in business. Low: A mouse just scurried across the living ro...

What happens when a Tel Aviv soccer team beats a French one? a) The French, impressed with this show of athleticism from the Jewish state, d...

"Long long a ago, in an almost forgotten time I was an overburdened student at the University of Chicago. When I wrote a piece about ho...

Zola on Jews in France , via Arts and Letters Daily.

In the bad idea department, " unschooling " has to rank in the top five of all time. Before children have even the slightest idea ...

Last night I went to something of a mixer. For the first time, there was some serious mingling of the French Studies girls and the rest of N...

Alex and I managed to cook yet not even come close to setting my parents' kitchen on fire, a remarkable improvement over yesterday's...

New York Magazine , hardly known for promoting anything on the cutting edge, anything other than that which is considered desirable by all N...

1) Gratinate potatoes and suspend apples in cake batter. Pick up pumpkin pie. Face Fairway crowds, unless alternative comes to me as part of...

Heaven forfend! Could it be? 10021 is no longer the creme de la skim cappuccino that it once was. Jay McInerney's piece in New York abo...

I'm a little embarrassed for my alma mater. Apparently a nerd school in the middle of a city known for deep-dish pizza is, despite appe...

This afternoon I had to leave the French Institute library because I could not stop laughing .