For the first time in a couple of decades, I recently watched Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic Metropolis, the two-and-a-half-hour restored cut: the Über Rich live in a paradisiacal topside that is part Manhattan and part Ancient Rome; the workers live in subterranean housing projects and commute to their (also underground) jobs on conveyances with a remarkable likeness to Mitt Romney’s car elevator. 

I grew up sailing on the Hudson with my father, in a fourteen-foot sloop he built himself. If you launch on the Rockland County side, just North of the Tappan Zee Bridge, there are two distinctive landmarks on the Westchester shore: Sing Sing Prison and the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant.

I wish the magazine Parenting would just go the full shot and rename itself Mothering; it’s never too late to be honest.

It’s a magazine by women, about women, and for women, with only a few obligatory Man Ghettos, a page or two on which fathers rear their dense and uncomprehending heads. I won’t bore you with comparative page counts or (follow the money!) an analysis of the advertising: more tampons than pickup trucks (and the latter at least can be gender neutral).