Sanctimony and the City (9)

"Some people are disappointed when their penthouses do not live up to their imaginations."

Preppy Handbook (1)

"Mr. Anvari is a gifted squash player, having cut his athletic teeth on the courts of the Heights Casino in Brooklyn Heights. He was the No. 1 player during his years at Dartmouth, and he is currently both the singles and a doubles champion at the University Club."

Sanctimony and the City (8)

"There is no comprehensive listing service for Brooklyn brownstones."

The Others (1)

"At Splendid, and countless other such delis and bodegas in New York, the sizzle of the grill and the call of the orders is part of the urban soundtrack, a mysterious shorthand that defines a subculture."

Sanctimony and the City (7)

"They still speak Sesotho to each other, and had the queen of Lesotho, who was studying at Columbia, as a dinner guest last year in their tiny Harlem apartment."

City & Country Squire (2)

"Walter Cronkite’s six-bedroom colonial on Martha’s Vineyard, with its own pier, was listed for $12.25 million."

City & Country Squire (1)

"These days, both in Europe and in the United States, Ms. Dickey finds herself drawn to landscapes with simple mowed paths through high grass in an orchard. And here, at Duck Hill, she can envision just grass and shrubs within the bones of her hedges."

Sanctimony and the City (6)

"'Yes,' said Ms. Franklin, 'That's Moet & Chandon.'

These bottles are empties, the artifacts of 12 years' worth of parties, creative summits, fund-raisers and the occasional visit from the band U2. The next month alone ... would bring two school-parent dinners; the annual gathering of the Progress Alliance, a left-leaning donor group; a fund-raiser for Representative Jay Inslee, Democrat of Washington; and a 'marvelously goofy TheFilmSchool event,' with guests acting out film roles, directed by the actor Tom Skerritt."

School's In (6)

"Andrew Beaton, 18, a former sports editor of The Daltonian who is now a freshman at Duke University, was disturbed by the move."

School's In (5)

"Mr. Steinberg is a self-described 'asthmatic Jewish kid,' a young Harvard graduate and a stalled novelist."

Learning to be Normal (1)

"Do yourself a favor and buy a hammer with a hickory or ash handle, since wood absorbs shock instead of delivering it straight to your bones. It’ll look beautiful when you hand it off to your grown child, and your arm will be in much better shape to present your gift. You’ll want a hammer with a curved claw for pulling nails, not the straight claw favored by wrecking crews and framers. And you’ll want a smooth-face hammer, not corrugated, so you don’t permanently crosshatch your door frame (or thumb) when you swing and miss."

Sanctimony and the City (5)

"Then, shortly after 8, a young man walked in with a young woman wearing a summery, skimpy dress — sleeveless and backless, so that you could detect some sort of elaborate tattoo between her shoulder blades — and they took two of the empty stools at the bar, leaning in close to each other to talk. About five minutes later, another young couple took two more stools; the woman, in a black tank top and gray denim miniskirt, was angled so that her knees almost touched the man’s. And there the four new arrivals sat, emblems of the way the neighborhood was changing, on prominent display. They drew several stares, though they didn’t seem conscious of that."

Sanctimony and the City (3)

"They had their next date at a Japanese restaurant, Cube 63, perfect for Ms. Meier, whose favorite shape is the square. After that, they quickly became the sort of downtown couple you see at small cafes, wearing cool coats and scarves, always carrying books and discussing art exhibitions they’d just seen."

Dwell

"The buzzer sounded then to announce Ms. Chiminazzo’s arrival at the loft, a rectangular box with a bed in full view of the kitchen and where a Diptyque Feu de Bois candle sat on a counter near a vase of Leonidas roses and where some white phalaenopsis orchids were arranged beneath portraits of models managed by ARC."

Sanctimony and the City (2)

"We stop at an outdoor cafe, Nowheres, on the Upper West Side, debating which movie to see, maybe just a walk, she suggests the zoo. [...] We discuss plans for dinner tonight, maybe. Someone who looks like Taylor Preston walks by, waves at me. I lower my Ray-Bans, wave back. Someone on a bike pedals past. I ask a busboy for water."

Food in General (3)

"She wound up leaving her gusanos de maguey untouched, and before dessert had arrived (vanilla ice cream with a flourish of cayenne-spiced and agave-syrup-sweetened mealworms), she and her husband had dashed back to the West Village to relieve their baby sitter."

Food in General (2)

"The menu included a ceviche abloom with the cross-pollinating flavors of jicama, papaya, sweet potato, jalapeño and crickets. 'Wax moth larvae taste like bacon, and mealworms sort of taste like pumpkinseeds,' he said. 'But crickets taste like crickets. They have their own distinct animal-ness. It’s sort of like goat. It’s strong.'"

School's In (4)

"The only detail of Scott and Anne's life that seems even remotely suggestive to me is that they adopted a Korean boy of thirteen the year after they married, named him Scott J. and sent him to Exeter, where Scott had gone to school four years before I attended."

Food Preparation (4)

"So when I went up to my place on Cape Cod, alone, for an extended end-of-summer visit, I realized that, with the exception of a couple of dinner invitations, I would be cooking for myself for an entire week, something I haven’t done in at least 10 years, and possibly never. It seemed worth recording."

Wine (2)

"We found other problems as well. Some of the wines lacked sufficient concentration, and tasted diluted. Others were oddly simple, lacking even the slightest degree of depth. Often, we sensed a disconnect between the aromas, which might resemble the classic scent of gewürztraminer, and the flavors, which seemed muted.

'If you’re going to make gewürztraminer, you know you’re not going to make money on it,' Rebecca mused. 'So why bother if you’re not going to do it right?'"

Wine

"'Do I want a white? Do I really want a chardonnay? We can eat redfish with a cabernet.'

'Go for it,' Anne says cheerily. 'Okay, I'll have the ... oh jeez, the sauvignon blanc,' Scott says. The waiter smiles, confused. 'Scottie,' Anne shrieks. 'The sauvignon blanc?' 'Just teasing,' he snickers. 'I'll have the chardonnay. The Acacia.'"

School's In (3)

"Money can buy many things to help children excel academically, like tutors and private school educations. But as those children go off to college, the one thing otherwise protective parents typically do not spend money on is making sure their children do not become victims of a crime."

Food Preparation (3)

"I thought about all the other things I could stir into the pot. Images of herbs, spices, prosciutto, garlic and lime zest swirled around in my head in various combinations. I might have even been able to tempt Dahlia into a few bites, but then in a moment of [...] rebellion, I decided to add something that was just for me: crumbles of pungent gorgonzola."

Food in General

"I've arrived at D'Agostino's, standing directly in front of it, gazing into it, and I have an almost overwhelming urge to walk in and browse through each aisle, filling my basket with bottles of balsamic vinegar and sea salt, roam through the vegetable and produce stands inspecting the color tones of red peppers and yellow peppers and green peppers and purple peppers, deciding what flavor, what shape of gingerbread cookie to buy, but I'm still longing for something deeper, something undefined to do before hand..."

School's In (2)

"The simple answer is that it is surely not fair that wealthy children can have private tutors when poor children cannot. But many things in life are not fair, and I want to look at tutoring from an investment point of view."

School's In

"Gage was also raised in California (Malibu) and attended public school until 10th grade, when she went to boarding school; Betterton grew up in Lawrenceville, N.J. Their educational brain wave struck after one of their au pairs took Leroy on a series of field trips.”

Self-Esteem

"'I'm creative, I'm young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I'm saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I'm an asset. [...] I didn't transfer from UCLA to Stanford to put up with this. I mean am I alone in thinking we're not making enough money?'"

Physical Fitness (2)

"Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have [...] displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too. A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. "

Physical Fitness

"In the two years since I signed up as a member, it has been remodeled three times and though they carry the latest weight machines (Nautilus, Universal, Keiser) they have a vast array of free weights which I like to use also. The club has ten courts for tennis and racquetball, aerobics classes, four aerobic dance studios, two swimming pools, Lifecycles, a Gravitron machine, rowing machines, treadmills, cross-country skiing machines, one-on-one training, cardiovascular evaluations, personalized programs, massage, sauna and steam rooms, a sun deck, tanning booths and a cafe with a juice bar, all of it designed by J.J. Vogel, who designed the new Norman Prager club, Petty's. Membership runs five thousand dollars annually."

Food Preparation (2)

"I layered everything together as I would any tiramisù, dipping ladyfingers into sparkling wine in place of the espresso, and layering them with mascarpone and moscato-drenched berries. I placed the dessert in the refrigerator to chill and waited for everything to coalesce. Then I tasted it. As I feared, the wine flavor was faint, and of course, the lively fizz completely gone."

Sanctimony and the City

"If anything, they thought we were a little nuts — in the late 1960’s the Upper West Side was one of New York’s fastest-declining neighborhoods, rife with drugs, crime and decay. Yet where others saw risk, we saw opportunity: affordable housing, racial and economic diversity and a vision of a sustainable, vibrant community not yet on the urban demographer’s radar."

Food Preparation

"Standing at the island in the kitchen I eat kiwifruit and a slice Japanese apple-pear (they cost four dollars each at Gristede's) out of aluminum storage boxes that were designed in West Germany. I take a bran muffin, a decaffeinated herbal tea bag and a box of oat-bran cereal from one of the large glass-front cabinets that make up most of an entire wall in the kitchen."

Knives

"At Sur La Table in SoHo, he admired the large selection of knives, especially the colorful Kuhn Rikon paring knives with plastic sheaths. They would be perfect for a picnic, he said — fun, inexpensive and safe."