The new dark romantic comedy from director Ed Zwick is a definite must. Love & Other Drugs takes place in the late 1990s, when the pharmaceutical industry was raging and Viagra made its debut appearance in the bedrooms of impotent and frustrated men. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a pharmaceutical salesman who loves to get in a variety of women’s panties. Anne Hathaway plays a sick girl who can’t deal with romantic bullshit and “has sex like a man.”

But can these two uncommitted hotties remain that way forever? Of course not. Love & Other Drugs has some memorable sex scenes, some laugh-out-load moments, and a good moral (the pharmaceutical industry is the devil and you should learn to be monogamous once you reach a certain age). So see it, because the holiday season is rough, and Jake and Anne are sexy.

- Haley Hogan [Follow me on Twitter & Read my other blog]

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Christie’s is one of the oldest and most prestigious fine art auction houses in the world — ostensibly, a place where one might meet a cultivated and interesting man.

I recently popped into their Rockefeller Center headquarters to say hello to a friend during her lunch hour. As I lounged in lobby, I watched an attractive man in a navy suit sauntering back and forth on the sidewalk by the entrance. He would occasionally smirk at his reflection in the building’s glass windowed façade. Obviously, he’s a contemporary art specialist who has bid upwards of thirty million dollars on a Jasper Johns and is rumored to be quite a devil on the croquet courts as well.

I was intrigued to ride the elevator with him back up to the 8^th floor. He smiled seductively before chugging a bottle of acai berry juice, choking, and then spilling his afternoon energy elixir. I suppose this kind of clumsiness can be endearing, but it more or less confirms he’s just another mimbo-disguised-as-a-prince.

- Lizzie Crocker

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In the dead of night on the streets of Rome there is a shop open that is full of junk (gold 1980s fanny packs, pink corsets, ancient basketball posters, styrofoam mannequin heads, American political pins, odd designer handbags, etc. etc.). It’s called “Miss France,” because Maryse Fabre, the 74-year-old French woman who runs it, was actually Miss France in 1956.

The store is only open between 10 pm and 2 am, when Maryse wants. Rumor has it that her odd hours are due to the fact that she is not legal to have a store and it’s her tactic for avoiding the police. My theory is that she had a grand love affair with a man in Malta (she speaks Maltese, an obscure language similar to Arabic). But her prince broke her heart, or died, and she staves off nighttime loneliness by opening her shop during the midnight hours.

Miss France was even featured in Nero Magazine and is sort of a local celebrity. She recounted her life story and said to me, “It’s so exciting that at this stage in your life there is a big question mark and so many great things await …” She became wistful and teary, perhaps thinking of her great love, the Maltese prince, or the fact that the rest of her life is inevitable: sneaking out to sell her precious old objects to strangers by the light of the Roman moon.

- Haley Hogan

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My experience on the fashion frontlines at the Karl Lagerfeld show in Paris was full of unexpected good fortune from strangers. After an hour of lying frozen in the same position on the ground of the Tuileries Gardens, wearing nothing but tights and a few trash bags, my limbs were trembling and I had lost all feeling in my hands and feet. I had my eyes closed to maintain the image of being dead, when all of a sudden I heard male voices circling around me.

One Louvre security guard crouched down close to me and started saying that I had to get up and clothe myself, because he was worried that I would become gravely sick. Since the Tuileries Gardens are the property of the Louvre Museum, it is the security guard’s problem if some deranged performance artist freezes to death on the premises. They scooped me up off the ground and seized my “Size Zero Kills” signs, refusing to give them back and threatening to call the police. But the young, adorable security guard who helped me off the ground seemed to be genuinely worried about my health, and said, “It’s a great cause!” He escorted me to the gates overlooking the Obélisque de Louxor in the Place de la Concorde and advised me to exhibit my signs at this strategic entryway.

As I stood with my shield-like signs in hand, my trash bags flapping in the wind, all the paparazzi, socialites, models, designers, and editors walked by to leave the fashion show, each with their own reaction of disdain, excitement, or merely a flash of their iPhone cameras. One statuesque fashionista smiled and shouted, “I’m not a size zero–I’m a size 4!”

Another woman approached me and commented, “But you’re not a size zero.” I replied, “No, I’m a size 4. I was a size zero and I almost died of anorexia.” Her response was: “You look great. You’re not too big, you’re not too small, you’re perfect!” She was so submerged in the fashion industry that even her compliment remained constricted by the ‘thinness institution.’ Nonetheless, it felt like a Chanel ballet flat in the right direction.

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I cut right from India to the land of the colonizers themselves. During my weekend in London I took advantage of that dry British humor by passing my time with a gaggle of Etonian boys. My host resided alone in the drafty townhouse of his parents, studying law by day and drinking G&Ts by night. His parents visit him on occasion, bearing sausages from their hog farm.

On this particular evening of “drinks with a view to dinner” (in the words of my well-bred host), the dinner menu involved the most surprisingly to-die-for dessert that I’ve had in years. In Britain people use the slightly unappetizing word “pudding” to refer to any form of dessert. And this night’s pudding involved a steamed sponge cake soaked in Treacle, accompanied by a whipped cream. There is something about Treacle that fails to disappoint. It is a golden syrup laced with lovely soporific effects. I slept soundly in the drawing room, visions of Aloysius dancing in my head.

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The lovely indie-chic romantic comedy, 500 Days of Summer, tells the story of a male 20-something phenomenon: the guy who is desperate to settle down to one woman and only one woman. He is the prince in this modern Los Angeles anti-fairy-tale, instead of the emotionally unavailable wanker so prevalent in popular films and everyday life. Unfortunately, the boy falls for the female twenty-something phenomenon: the girl who is desperate to remain “casual” and never commit to one guy. She is the princess in flight.

The disarmingly disgruntled leading man realizes that he is not the prince to his princess. Romantic relationships are so often littered with this imbalance of expectations — one person wants to have a baby, and the other person just wants to go to happy hour at a karaoke bar. You could call it “bad timing.” But for the ones who want to have a baby, it’s more like an extended mourning period of bleak wandering in streets that are haunted by the girl who liked to sing karaoke.

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On a recent trip to Venice, my sister and I found ourselves eating one of the most delicious meals of our lives at Osteria Ai 40 Ladroni, or The Forty Thieves. It is an exceptional restaurant not only for its to-die-for squid ink pasta dish but also for the fact that it’s where my sister got married.

There was a charming and virile-looking Italian waiter serving us. And my sister is famous for her Strega-Nona-like love of pasta, so she turned to me midway through the meal and said, “This waiter is cute, right? And he could serve me the most delicious homemade pasta, and he lives in Venice, a beautiful city.” Since her horoscope had recently informed her that she would meet the love of her life that day, one thing led to another … and before we knew it, Maurizio (as he was called) was announcing to the packed room of Italian families: “I present to you my wife!” Everyone was clapping and laughing and drinking limoncello.

Enough with the emotionally unavailable men — here’s to Italian princes bearing plates of pasta and seafood delicacies. Though Maurizio doesn’t have an email address, he promised to do some email writing to my sister by way of the restaurant’s office. After all, unfulfilled love affairs are usually more romantic.

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The recent romantic comedy, He’s Just Not That Into You, was an unexpected burst of truth on contemporary dating in an age of Facebook, email writing, and text message disasters. Gigi (played by the adorable Ginnifer Goodwin) waits at the phone every night for her crush to call her. She fails to see the difference between a. men who are flirting with her at a bar because they are drunk, b. men who want to date her, and c. men who never want to see her again.

The manager at Gigi’s local bar lets her in on some heterosexual man insight: “If a guy is into a girl, then he will make it happen, so if he hasn’t called her or asked her on another date, he’s just not that into her.” Women often give bad advice to other women: for example, if a girl is desperately in love with a guy for a period of many years, then her female friend might say to her, “He’s definitely gay, and that’s why he’s dating that incredibly masculine girl.” Alternatively, she might say, “Men are like pears — they have to ripen in a brown paper bag before they are ready to commit to the one they really love. He just needs another 2-12 years to really ripen!”

Gigi ends up converting the wanker-commitment-phobic-barman to a prince who is ready for a real relationship. Moral of the story: miracles can happen in fictitious versions of Baltimore that are populated by incredibly attractive people.

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As an expatriate lurking in the snowy streets of Moscow and sporting ridiculous fur hats, my friend recently met an older Russian man who was selling his book of poems on the sidewalk. She apologized to the poet for not being able to buy his book, saying that she did not understand enough Russian. But he gave her some sage advice: “If you just keep on reading and reading you will someday understand!” She ended up buying the book.

The young American girl and the old school Russian poet hit it off, and soon they were exchanging email addresses. He exclaimed to her, “I hope you find a great man to love you very much!” She said, “I hope so too.” He intuited that she played piano as a child and urged her to take up the instrument again because it would lead her to a great man who would love her. The elderly poet also told her that he loves his wife very much. A real prince in the Russian night, spreading love to warm the wayward American girl in the frigid Moscow air.

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My friend recently had an unfortunate evening in Moscow that involved “a charming cocktail of vodka beer rum wine baiileys rum and our old friend jager” (according to her latest email). And at that point she left her purse in the “cab” (which was actually a civilian car, since proper taxis don’t really exist in Moscow). She returned back to her boyfriend’s apartment with nothing but a few kopecks and a stick of gum. The lost purse was filled with vital items (like credit cards, and passports, and prescription meds, and reading glasses, and the visa permitting her to stay in said semi-sinister Eastern European country).

But instead of suffering through twelve years of standing in line to obtain her new passport and documents (not to mention the numerous mean Russian ladies who would yell at her in the process), it turns out that the bad-drinking-etiquette-silly-American-girl-traveling-in-cold-climates fairy was watching over her that night. The “cab” driver found her purse and handed her documents over to the Russian militia, after stealing her camera, cash, and iPod. She was so delighted to get her passport and papers back that she felt the “cab” driver deserved all the other stuff as a reward. Let’s just call it karma.

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