On a recent karaoke bar evening, a friend of mine got up to sing a song in honor of the many twists her life had taken in the past year: Que Sera, Sera. Whatever will be, will be. As I sipped my Kirin Lager, it occurred to me that this sentiment could describe the effects […]

Movies are just movies — everyone knows that. They’re not real, they’re fiction. Even movies based on true stories are fictionalized (does anyone really think the upcoming Bruckheimer/Bay Pearl Harbor is going to tell it like it was?). Even so, movies are generally pretty good at evoking certain feelings in us, even though we know […]

The other day as I sat flipping through Bazaar while waiting for my nail polish to dry I began to get the sneaky feeling that the folks at “Bazaar” were telling me I should look more like Gwyneth Paltrow. Of course I actually enjoy eating and I don’t have a personal trainer or a makeup […]

As an urban-centered female in the post-teen and pre-middle age demographic, it’s fair to say I spend a good deal of time contemplating fashion. Though I prefer to define my look as effortless hip (you know, I just look this cool naturally without even trying), the truth is that a fair amount of thought goes […]

Freud said, among other things, that as average people became more educated, their reliance on organized religion and spirituality would fade and eventually disappear altogether. Obviously, this has yet to happen. Though my generation (I’m on the early cusp of the so-called Generation X) is likely the first in which a large proportion of Americans […]

I grew up in Baltimore, and by the time I was 11, Mom decided it would be a good idea for me to go somewhere during the summers (reasoning that the city was stiflingly hot and besides, things like horseback riding and wilderness hiking are good for building character). So for six years I traveled […]

One recent morning as I perused the op-ed section of the New York Times, I came across a passage describing a certain upper West Coast city’s differences with Los Angeles. It went something like this: “To the south, the tawdry celluloid behemoth dispensing lowbrow entertainment; to the north the capital of the new economy with […]

We Americans are a smart lot. We know, for instance, that the “com” in dot-com stands for commercial. We also know that “edu” stands for education, that “mil” is for military, and that “gov” is short for government. We also know that the only extension that screams “Internet” is .com Even if you think of […]

Last week I watched the 1976 film “All the President’s Men.” Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play “Washington Post” reporters Woodward and Bernstein on the trail of the story that ultimately destroyed Nixon’s presidency. What’s surprising about this film is not that two regular joes managed to bring down a president, but that they did […]

Last night I went to a bar in downtown San Francisco to meet a number of journalists I used to work with. On the way inside, I passed through a somber knot of patrons chain smoking in the heated atrium the proprietors had set up to get around California’s ban on smoking in bars. It […]