Dear Readers, This week we ‘wagoneers—at least Theodore and myself—picked up on a trope launched a couple of weeks earlier by Nathan: the open letter. Isn’t it a fine idea? You pretend to be writing a letter—say, to porn star Sasha Grey—and that’s like an article! And then people starting writing open letters back and …
Author Archives: Matt
An Open Letter to the Nice Lady on the Subway
Dear Nice Lady, First off, thank you! On our way back from preschool, I sat down next to you on the F train—and Sasha immediately turned crabby. You know the kind of crabby: whining, limp as an overcooked strand of spaghetti, unwilling either to sit or stand or be held. But you! With the lightning …
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What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Part 2
When I took the family up to Maine for vacation last week, I thought I knew what to expect: lobster, farm stands, pond swimming. Maybe, I thought, I’d even get to relax a little. What I didn’t realize was that Jean and I were about to embark on our most intense 10 days of parenting …
Those Darn Kids!
This coming weekend’s New York Times Magazine story—about the tsunami of 20-somethings who are taking ages to grow up—makes me a little queasy. It’s not that the magazine has identified a fake trend, or that I’m annoyed to be reading about these silly, optimistic young people. It’s that, early on, after establishing that the phenomenon …