For my entire life anytime I complain about anything my mother responds with some newly acquired anecdote about someone who has it harder. I first noticed the pattern in college after I griped about a roommate and she told me about a boy born without hands who had taught himself to paint by holding a paintbrush between his teeth. 

It’s true: J.D. Salinger did continue to write from 1965, when his work last appeared, to his death in 2010.

Announcing the publishing event of the decade….

“Come to my chambers,” said Xara, the 2,000-year-old temptress empress to intrepid explorer Maximilian Wolfsburg over the sounds of advancing troops. “I wish to know more of what you call pasta.”

From the moment you enter the austere and tragically hip Konqrete Fuud Centre, you will be swept away by its passionate serenity. Cloisterlike in its stillness, the restaurant’s concrete walls, floor, ceiling, and accoutrements express a deep civility and liberating blankness. There are only eight tables in the 1,200 square foot room, each a lacquered slab of concrete sparsely surrounded by utterly tasteful concrete stumps. The ambience promotes the intense focus of savasana without the relaxation. One does not lounge at the KFC as much as one perches, aware and yet ineffably calm.

We’ve all heard horror stories about small town medical practices.  I guess I got off lucky. I grew up in the 1950s in Frederick, Maryland, at the time a town of fewer than 20,000 people. I never had to go to the local orthopedist, a man nicknamed “Wrong Knee” or had a colonoscopy performed by that doctor who kept his patients awake and just had them lean over a sawhorse to let the scoping begin. Things were a little dicier for me, though, in the dental arena.