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Between 1965 and 1980, my mother, Frances Junod, served cutlets of pale flesh - mostly veal and chicken, though sometimes pork - to my father, my brother and sister, and me at least twice a week.
We might accept pit bulls personally, but America still doesn't accept them institutionally, where it counts; indeed, apartment complexes and insurance companies are arrayed in force against them.
A lot of people like to say that they have trouble getting gifts. I have trouble giving them. It's not out of a lack of generosity, mind you. My fallback is to go big, no matter what the occasion.
Every artist can make art only from the materials at hand, and many of the child stars who try to mature into artists can make art only from their knowledge - and ours - that they were child stars.
The fact is, you can't have Southern friends without eventually wanting to sing with them, and without eventually learning that the only way to sing with them is to make your peace with country music.
Music subscriptions will eventually replace music collections because the digital universe is oriented against the idea of ownership - because music ownership is itself the eight-track of the Internet.
I am not running for president, but I've always known if I ever did run for president - or local dogcatcher, for that matter - the boy I bullied would and should arise as a necessary ghost from my past.
By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.
When a cocker spaniel bites, it does so as a member of its species; it is never anything but a dog. When a pit bull bites, it does so as a member of its breed. A pit bull is never anything but a pit bull.
Most people are hungry, therefore they eat. I am hungry, therefore I cook. Since my senior year in college, when I moved into an apartment with a bunch of friends, I have cooked almost every day of my life.
My ten-year-old daughter loves gifts. She loves to give them and she loves to get them. She loves to give them when she's hurt her parents' feelings, and she loves to get them when her parents have hurt hers.
Josh Ozersky was a meat man. He knew meat, revered it, studied it, sang it, evangelized it, wrote about it, and, of course, ate it. Lots of it. Life, for Josh, was meat, and writing. Everything else was a side.
I have a mean streak and I am capable of cruelty. This does not mean that I am necessarily mean and cruel; instead, it means that I have to be vigilant about my capacity for cruelty and the mean bone in my body.
The great character actors are now the actors whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice once claimed by the DeNiros of the world, as well as the element of danger - the actors who thrill us by going for broke.
Now, I'm fully aware that there is only one figure more pitiable, more ludicrous, more inherently ridiculous than a bad singer who keeps on singing, and that's a bad singer who keeps on singing because he has issues.
I'm a suit guy. I like wearing them for the sense of completion they offer. I like buying them for the sense of near permanence - the knowledge that whatever I buy will be part of my life for the next ten years or so.
I didn't love David Bowie. Sure, I loved a lot of his songs, like everybody else, and, like everybody else, I had an incarnation of Bowie that I loved best - in my case, the solemn 'art-rock' Bowie of the late Seventies.
His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television.
There's an easy way to tell who won a fight, whether it occurs in a ring or in a schoolyard. Watch it with a second-grade boy and ask him the winner. He'll always know. If he doesn't know, the fight wasn't worth watching.
Character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini have found themselves getting more and more leading roles because they are permitted to behave onscreen in ways that George Clooney and Matt Damon never could.
And you understand something: that although, like all American eaters, you've been conditioned to think of the entree as the climax of the meal, it never is. It is, indeed, almost always disappointing, especially if you order fish.
The suits are as similar as uniforms, and yet you can tell their individual qualities by how they respond to movement - the good ones ripple like wheat in a field and provide not a show of monotony but rather a spectacle of plenty.
Without your data, Google couldn't pursue the dream of trying to figure out what you're really thinking when you're asking a question, of trying to discern, from the imprecision of your language, the exact answer you're looking for.
It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.
The two biggest meals of your life you don't have to cook and you don't get to eat. The first you don't eat because no man eats - or cares what he eats - at his wedding. The second you don't eat because, well, no man eats at his funeral, either.
Gluttony is harder than it looks. It's listed as a sin, as something you give in to, when really it's a skill, requiring not just hunger but resilience. That's why the most resilient city in the country, New Orleans, is also the most gluttonous.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn't like himself very much. It was not his fault. He was born with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. It means that you can think but sometimes can't walk, or even talk.
Every celebrity has become a celebrity because of sex and money. But few celebrities like talking about either sex or money; they would rather talk about ideas, or ideals, or solving the world's problems - all against a backdrop of sex and money.
I am an adoptive parent. My wife and I adopted our daughter nine years ago. She was born in China. We have been her parents since she was nine and a half months old, and we don't know very much about her life before we first took her into our arms.
The child stars who emerged from Disney boot camp and dominated pop culture in the late '90s and '00s are not only still around but also have spawned successors who have proven even more indispensable to the business of music, movies, and television.
But I'm not an Atlanta Falcons fan. Nobody is. Sure, the team has its followers, its adherents, in Atlanta. But they don't follow the team the way fans from other teams follow their teams - the way, say, fans of the New Orleans Saints follow the Saints.
The main difference between listening to music on a computer and listening to music on vinyl or disc is not sound quality or even portability; it's that when you listen to music on a computer, you listen to music on the same instrument you use to acquire it.
There are only three questions that matter in the kitchen if you're cooking and not baking. The first is how good are your ingredients; the second is how much salt to add; and the third is how long to cook whatever it is you're cooking - the question of doneness.
The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.
Let's face it: There used to be something tragic about even the most beautiful forty-two-year-old woman. With half her life still ahead of her, she was deemed to be at the end of something--namely, everything society valued in her, other than her success as a mother.
I forget what I wore for my first encounter with Mark Zuckerberg. I know it wasn't a suit - that would have seemed out of place in the rigorously casual world of Facebook. I probably wore what I usually wear, a pair of jeans and a Gap T-shirt, maybe my black sneakers.
I had heard a lot of stories about my father and celebrities, most of them from his own mouth. In his stories, famous women flirted with him outrageously and helplessly, and famous men sought his company, paid him deference, or took umbrage after being upstaged by him.
I met fred rogers in 1998, when 'Esquire' assigned me a story about him for a special issue on American heroes. I last spoke with him on Christmas Day 2002, when I called him to talk about an argument I'd had with my cousin; he died two months later, on February 27, 2003.
We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.
I was a bully in fifth and sixth grade. I wasn't one of the bullies - I wasn't strong or dominant enough to be one of the kids who bullied everyone in equal measure. I was a bully, in that I bullied a kid, whose name I won't mention here. My bullying was selective and personal.
My parents were ambitious people, my father especially, whose entire life was devoted to rising above, but his ambitions were defeated long before death finished them off, and so when he died, he came back to where he started, but he didn't come back home, because there was no home to come back to.
That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.
Weddings have become an expression not just of our desires but also our ambitions, and so more and more the food at weddings is like the food everywhere else, with the ingredients parsed for purity and the preparation praised for ingenuity and the sushi chef standing where the carving table used to be.
Fred Rogers was a children's-TV host, but he was not Captain Kangaroo or Officer Joe Bolton. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who was so appalled by what he saw on 1950s television--adults trying to entertain children by throwing pies in each other's faces - that he joined the medium as a reformer.
My mother was not a country girl. She was a Brooklyn girl, born and raised in Flatbush, and then a Long Island girl, who liked shopping, 'a little glitter' in her clothes, and keeping secret the actual color of her hair, which from the day I was born to the day she died, was the 'platinum blonde' of Jean Harlow's.
A mob pelting pilloried wrongdoers with rotten vegetables would seem to have little in common with one doing the same with 140-character invective, except of course the most important thing: the belief that they are in the right, and are even doing good by making the object of their contempt feel really, really bad.