The Christmas card from strangers
This December week, I received precisely one dozen Christmas cards.
Baking for nobody
I just baked 12 dozen Christmas cookies for no one. I do the baking every year; the “no one” part I’m still getting used to. When I ran a magazine, I’d make a batch of these each December week and bring them in on Mondays for the staff. A junior editor who became a senior […]
A bad gifter
I give bad gifts. Size 5 shoes to size 11 feet. Yogurt makers to the lactose intolerant. Diaries to the discreet. Sheet music to the relentlessly tone deaf. It’s not that I am thoughtless—I’m thinking, I’m thinking, believe me. It’s just that I have this holiday weakness of idealizing my friends and family, sometimes to […]
Dating ethnic foods for Christmas
Our family of six sisters had a tradition as we dated in high school and college. If you brought a boy home for Christmas Eve dinner, you had to force him to bring along a traditional dish representing his ethnic heritage. This was how we learned to embrace exotically diverse non-Scandinavians, not to mention expand […]
‘Heartland’ is family-friendly but not unbearably cheesy
For all its wholesomeness, “Heartland” is not sickly sweet and doesn’t sidestep the realities of life.
In ‘Severance,’ a bleak look at soul-stealing office culture
The Apple TV+ series “Severance” sends us back to work in prepandemic corporate America.
How Molly Burhans is helping the church fight climate change
A young cartographer is helping the church catalog its land holdings so it might address the environment, human migration, and sustainable land stewardship.
‘Ted Lasso’ shows a better way to be a man
Apple TV+’s ‘Ted Lasso’ is a skillfully crafted story about masculinity that is compassionate and supportive.
Tennant’s Fogg travels to find himself anew
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ offers an ode to taking chances.