As all savvy up-and-coming artists living with their parents will tell you, being a nanny can be the most ideal way to earn tax-free money. My friend wound up babysitting for a family who has an unconventional “communal bed.” Translation: everyone in the family (including the 16-year-old son) sleeps in the same bed. Talk about [...]

Psychological pregnancy is a little-known phenomenon that makes someone who is not pregnant feel and act like a pregnant woman. Abdominal swelling, food cravings, and even labor pains can arise—only no baby comes out at the end of the nine-month physical discomfort.
Pseudocyesis arises when a woman is desperate to become pregnant, or when she is [...]

Summertime comes and people resort to meeting strangers on the street and agreeing to go on first dates with them. Unfortunately, the lighting at night on said streets often obscures the person’s true mimbo factor, and a man who at first appears to resemble Jude Law in fact resembles something a bit closer to Jack [...]

Unfortunately, my recent interfacing with strangers on the internet has proven the adage that “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” I found the rare Paris Craigslist gem: a luxurious one bedroom apartment just steps from Place des Vosges, for a mere 630 euros a month. There was a brand-new designer [...]

Salum has managed a local gourmet ice cream shop ever since he moved to America from Mozambique nine years ago. He lives above the ice cream store and has worked nonstop 365 days a year for the past 9 years. At 7am he reports to duty making the ice cream from scratch, at 4:30 in [...]

A man I know pretends to be a hotel mogul, or at least the child of a hotel mogul, but more often than not, he strikes me as a compulsive liar. He pays exorbitant amounts of money for my friends to flounce about the hot spots of lower Manhattan and at every venue the management [...]

The classic Hollywood theme of the magical makeover is ever present in Sydney Pollack’s oh-so-’90s version of Sabrina. A sojourn in Paris transforms Sabrina from an awkward “ugly duckling” wallflower to a radiant vision of femininity. Her lifetime crush (played by Greg Kinnear) is a shallow trust fund baby and a quintessential mimbo: blondish, boyish, [...]

Since Michael Jackson died, it has been a surreal world out there—mainly because the only songs played in public areas are MJ classics. The dance club near my current residence was no exception. And even though the crowd was mixed, the music was kickin’ it old school.
Gauche things to do on the dance floor:

1. Mentioning [...]

Let’s just say for the sake of argument that my friend was dating a boy named Dick Inwood. He was a prince with a roving eye and without vertebrae. He was fond of nights out in Shanghai, girls who wear Uggs, SKEX (Sex via Skype), and the law—not necessarily in that order. Dick Inwood makes [...]

A thunderstorm and a marathon of David Lynch’s surreal-sinister TV series, Twin Peaks, devolved into an afternoon receiving wisdom from a psychic named Stacey in the Leather District. When a Parisian pop start receives a tarot card reading at the start of Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, she learns that she is going [...]