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" Family is whatever you say it is. "
Rumaan Alam
Whatever
You
Say
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" Lindsay Hatton's novel 'Monterey Bay' so beautifully evokes the landscape of the titular locale, you'll feel transported to Northern California even if you're reading it on the bus on your morning commute. "
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" That's part of fashion's promise: that a girlfriend or boyfriend or a promotion are just one tie or sweater or pair of shoes away. "
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" To be five years old is to be surprised by life. I'm amused by my children's awe at quotidian things - a toy helicopter, a bubble bath, the visible tentacles on a plate of calamari. And I'm envious of their ability to attain something I often can't: a state of transcendence induced by art. "
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" Children are weird. I was going to say 'most children,' but I think this a rare universal law. "
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" Because the designers at Baby Gap and Crew Cuts have determined it would be cute if kids dressed like their dads, seemingly every American male between 2 and 52 dresses identically. "
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" The person most qualified to tell the tale of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the man himself, as gifted an intellect as he is an athlete. "
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" You can't control what's going to happen to the book you're about to publish. "
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" Fashion has underscored the interchangeability of men for a long time, maybe from the outset. "
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" We have all come from a woman in some fashion. "
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" Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon. "
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" With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women. "
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" I mourn for the kind of dad I didn't have; I rue my first broken family while taking joy in the one that I've made. "
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" Shot glasses make me think of youth and a mode of drinking and living that was never mine, even when I was the age for it. "
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" Wishing there were more children's books like 'The Snowy Day' is a bit like wishing there were more grownup books like 'Anna Karenina.' There are only so many masterpieces out there. "
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" I married the man I love when the state of California said I could. We made a family through adoption, as New York State said we could. From the outside, our family - two dads, two sons via adoption - seems like an experiment, but what family isn't an experiment? "
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" When we had our first son, four different people gave us the same present: a copy of Ezra Jack Keats' 'The Snowy Day.' A new child often inspires duplicate gifts - we were given a dozen mostly useless baby blankets, just one more thing to spit up on - but this one was different. "
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" I don't have a Winslow Homer or a Renoir, but I do have the liberty to live as I like. "
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" I reject the notion that one should feel guilty about what you don't know. "
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" Subtlety doesn't work with kids. "
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" In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels. "
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" I've spent many hours of my life browsing in stores. At 21, I admired clothes I couldn't afford. At 30, I bought them. At 40, I sometimes go simply for the pleasure, of seeing what is new, of learning what counts as beautiful now. "
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" I'm a square. I always wanted the standard-issue American dream: beautiful home, loving husband, couple of kids. I met another square, and we got married; a year later, we had a baby; three years later, had another. "
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" Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner. "
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" This tension between ambition and parenthood, that's not a reckoning that many men face. There are plenty of men who say, 'Oh, I need to be there for my kids, and I can't do x or y professionally,' but for the most part, that's a struggle that belongs to women in society. "
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" Parenting advice is mostly useless because every family is uniquely its own; artistic advice is mostly useless because every artist works in their own way. Thus, figuring out how to balance the two has an intense specificity. "
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