A Year In New York

The announcement appeared on the refrigerator: “A Brazilian Television Show Is Here at 2 p.m. Today to Do a Segment on Paragraph. Anyone Interested in Being Interviewed, Tell Lila.”

The Brazilians didn’t arrive until three, I observed as I pretended to read a book in the corner of the lunchroom. They bustled in fresh and laughing, [...]

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Today is the one-year anniversary of the most popular blog post I’ve ever written. I take little credit for this fact. If this post were a pop song, I’d be the bassist holding up the wall while another guy wagged his tail at the audience. That guy, of course, was an Illinois senator named Barack [...]

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Writers are like cats: a single animal can be companionable and charming, but a whole pride of them is a house divided against itself. Don’t be surprised if they hiss and spit at each other, strike poses on top of the refrigerator and stalk off to sulk under the bed.

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Last night I made my first trip under the East River to Williamsburg, a refuge for the quirky-arty types who have been priced out of Manhattan. The crowd on the L train was young, I noted. Brooklyn girls wear strong, floral perfume.

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Yesterday Paragraph, my writing community, took on the editors of New York magazine for a semi-friendly game of softball, the city’s scribes being loosely affiliated into a league and this game, in the sunny and mild week before Labor Day, being the season’s final inning.
Team Paragraph arrived early at East River Park (no bosses overseeing [...]

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My friend Dane Golden is in town from San Francisco and wrangled us a tour of the offices of Mad magazine, the publication that was honing satire to a lethal edge years before Stephen Colbert and the editors of The Onion were even born.
The office is in a glitzy tower on Broadway near Times Square, [...]

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This evening I unexpectedly find myself at dinner on the Lower East Side with a columnist for a big New York magazine and his girlfriend. (Don’t ask.) There had been no warning, no time to prepare.
I smile and nod gamely over the eggplant lasagna and wish I’d shaved, or combed my hair, or gotten around [...]

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I met my friend Jacques for a drink in the West Village, where we navigated the bridge-and-tunnel crowd buoyed by political bonhomie and a dangerously strong pitcher of margaritas.

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Today I reported for my first session at Paragraph, a haven for writers that sits above a funky lamp store near Union Square. New York is a city of extremes and Paragraph occupies its own special niche: It is a very, very quiet place.

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You’re at a wine bar called Buceo 95 on the Upper West Side, the kind of place with red lounge lamps suspended from the ceiling, and it comes time for everyone at the table to boast or lie about what they do for a living.

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