Go ask Alice

Are Alice Waters' gastronomic principles -- shop locally, eat organically -- too hard to live by? A frank talk with the renowned guru of fresh food.

I had been prepared to skewer Alice Waters. Though I have eaten some of the best food I've ever encountered at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and though I have generally tried to live by the gastronomic principles that she's become famous championing, and though I believe that the world would be better off in nearly every way if more people listened to her, there is a limit to what can be expected of us -- of me! -- and I wanted to tell her, Alice Waters, you just want too much.

by Farhad Manjoo

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Maturity Was Just Too Messy for Me

"The details of the relationship were as follows: I was 24, saddled with a boring job at a giant food products company outside of Chicago, living at my family's home in an upscale suburb north of the city, saving money for the down payment on a condominium that I would never come to buy. She was 41, a former lawyer, divorced and the mother of three young children, a boy and two girls. As it turned out, she also happened to live in the same suburb as my family, less than five minutes from my home.

We met in an evening class at Northwestern. I knew little about her before asking her out, only that she had terrific black hair and that we'd gone to the same university, though she made it clear when it came up in conversation that she had gone there many, many years before I had.

I knew, too, that there was a sexual résumé I was hoping to build; I had been with the same girlfriend from high school through college and had little experience otherwise.

Several weeks into the course, I sent this woman an e-mail message (I had found her address on the class list), asking her straight out if she would like to have a drink with me.

She didn't respond."

By Peter Levine

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Parallel Play: A lifetime of restless isolation explained

My second-grade teacher never liked me much, and one assignment I turned in annoyed her so extravagantly that the red pencil with which she scrawled “See me!” broke through the lined paper. Our class had been asked to write about a recent field trip, and, as was so often the case in those days, I had noticed the wrong things:

Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut on Route 44A. It was very pretty and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew it we were going home. We went through Warrenville again but it was too dark to see much. A few days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock.

by Tim Page

Read entire article: Parallel Play: A lifetime of restless isolation explained