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I taught the novel Dangerous Liaisons for many years with great success, and I watched the movie version with my undergrads in class. In their final essays, they told me, in ingenious ways, why the book’s topic, cruelty, had to be well written with care, and how setting the novel in a different time period worked
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To say that this book saved me is an understatement. I’m not getting schmaltzy on you, but yes, like other parents way back then, when the Encyclopedia Britannica was the flavor of the year, many parents bought a set. Mine did. But when some other guy pressed our doorbell years later, and my father and
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As many of you know, we left Manhattan for Houston to attend Graduate School in the late 1990s. Before then, I worked my way through Hunter College by catering private homes and many other-sized parties, thanks to this woman, who hired my husband and me. We worked every Jewish Holiday together as a duet and had
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It’s no big surprise that healthy people in their later years want to and know how to make new friends. It took me a long time to figure out that setting boundaries for some friends, including family, and getting busy with a group of other newer friends focused on helping others was the key to
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I agreed to be a sponsor one time, and pretty much all I did one night was give this advice: “Can you love yourself and hold off from using for another hour and call me back?” and she said, “I think so…” I answered her phone calls, listened to her, and gave the same advice
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Yesterday, on the way to my workout at Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, I exited the subway station and found a cluster of Orthodox Jews waiting at the top of the stairs. Three women and one man. Since, as the author Anita Diamant, noted, as a Union Reform Jew, they will always be considered my cousins.
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I have never been a fan, but I gotta say that Taylor Swift’s new album is just terrible. I kept saying, “Ah, come on!” while listening. Idioms, clichés, overused phrases, no original ideas, expository, feels rushed. I couldn’t connect the songs to the theme. Her pop, white rapper song, “Wood,” is raunchy but in a
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Actor David Duchovny recently told someone I admire that poetry is useless but necessary. Zzzzzz. Do a Google search. Like many of his comments, Duchovny is not the first person to use this analogy, a clunky way of saying that he’s so much deeper than other people. How quickly celebrities rise in the book publishing
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Mary Louise Penaz 