“She had always hated being alone. For her, having to do certain things, such as eat a meal, without company was like a punishment. She would rather have gone out to dinner with someone she didn’t even much care for than eat in alone.”
2. “In Indiana, Clues to Future of Wisconsin Labor”
“His 2005 executive order has had a sweeping impact: no raises for state employees in some years, a weakening of seniority preferences and a far greater freedom to consolidate state operations or outsource them to private companies.”
3. “For Ohio Students, Boxing Rings Become Refuges”
“They could send their children to boxing clubs and live with the inevitable bruised foreheads and bloodied lips. Or they could leave them alone after school in neighborhoods that are often troubled by gangs and crime.”
4. “Lawmakers Debate Effect of Weapons on Campus”
“Some gun rights advocates go so far as to say that grade school teachers ought to be armed.”
5. “Genius Loves Company in N.B.A. Balance of Power”
“The recent movement should actually be viewed as a positive development for a sport that spent the better part of a decade in the aftermath of the Jordan-Bulls era putting out intrasquad fires in cities of all sizes.”
6. “Your Résumé, for All to See”
“Should you start a Web site, solely for job hunting, that features your résumé?”
7. “Best Movie Query? You Win”
“My favorite part of the Oscar season is complaining about all the attention that this ludicrously overhyped, trivial spectacle of industry narcissism receives from serious movie people, which is why I relentlessly bad mouth it.”
8. “The Inside Story on Outsiderness”
“Since Mr. Ligon’s work draws heavily on written sources, one might expect his Brooklyn studio to resemble the Collyer Brothers’ apartment, a haphazard pile-up of books, magazines and papers. But instead, his sunny space is spotless, with only one neatly arranged bookshelf and crisp white walls where a few of his painting hang. (Others are carefully propped up on the floor, leaning against one another.)”
9. “Lorin Stein, the Paris Review’s New Party Boy”
“His desk has an old-fashioned Rolodex, a vintage Lucky Strike case and a neat bowl of paper clips. A small, cream-colored saucer doubled as an ashtray for his Marlboro Reds. A martini glass, mostly drained of Tanqueray, rested near a typed manuscript.”
10. “The Oscars, New York-Style”
“New York, especially in the dead of winter, deeply needs Los Angeles to be bright, glamorous and flawed. In one form or another, it’s an expectation that the East Coast has had of California for a while.”
“I’m working on something that could be marvelous, but I’ll have to do it in my own way.”
“Americans black and white came to think of Ethel Waters not as mother, but as mammy to us all.”
“Americans, and baby boomers especially, are blinded to the most regrettable facts of old age because we … have been steeped for decades in the national can-do, self-help, will-can-make-it-so stew.”
“The Web giveth, and the Web taketh away.”
15. “Queen of the Mommy Bloggers”
“The month Leta Armstrong was born, Technorati estimated that there were two million blogs on the Internet, a number that was doubling every five months. Of those, Armstrong’s was one of the few — one of the earliest — successful personal narratives. It was a life lived as a cautionary tale. A daily reality show on a smaller screen. Readers had already shown they would click through for breaking news, Hollywood gossip and techie inside dirt. Now they were showing that they’d also come to hear a blogger say what others might have thought, or feared, or wondered, but had kept to themselves.”
Submitted For Your Perusal 