Playing in Graveyards: When Terror Collides with Larp
How the September 11 attacks affected a New York City larp group. Notes from my Spring 2012 Nordic Larp Talk.
Category Clips
Mad About the Boy in Wyrd Con Book
The Wyrd Con Book, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek is out. The book is an anthology of essays about gaming and larp put out by California’s Wyrd Con convention. It’s available for free download here. I’ve got…
Is 25% the New Standard for Tipping?
It’s a question we all face – what’s a reasonable tip for your waiter? After all, the last thing you want is to get on the bad side of the person who handles your food. According to the New York…
The Corn Curl Experiment
AIDS, a 30-year-old corn curl, and eternal friendship. My new nonfiction essay in The Good Men Project.
If Famous Writers Had Written Twilight…
On a recent car-trip we mulled over the question: What if great literary writers of the last 200 years had penned Twilight? For starters, Cormac McCarthy's version would begin with necrophilia.
Why My Family Treasures Culinary Heirlooms
My grandmother has a 149-year old piece of cheese. This, and other tales of culinary heirlooms and the agrarian utopias they evoke, at least for the Stark household.
In Defense of Cookbooks
Cookbooks rule, apps drool. A piece I wrote for Bites, the Today Show food blog.
Goodbye To My Boobs
Yeah, I did it. I amputated my healthy breasts at age 28 after discovering my sky-high chances of getting breast cancer. And I don't regret it one bit.
I’m 27 and about to have a double mastectomy
Even though I’m a healthy 27-year-old woman right now, I'm going to have both my breasts removed as a preventative measure because I’m a member of a very exclusive club: Like one out of 1,000 women, I have a genetic mutation that dramatically ups my chance of cancer. My gene — called the BRCA1 gene — gives me a 40 percent to 85 percent lifetime risk of developing breast cancer, and a risk of ovarian cancer that is 30 percent to 70 percent higher than women who do not have this gene, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Haute McNuggets
Meet Erik Trinidad, the culinary wunderkind who turns Taco Bell burritos into ravioli, Subway sandwiches into Chinese stir-fry, and Boston Kremes into creme brulee. A Daily Beast feature.