Burning through Your New York Times Allowance

I didn't realize how quickly a girl could use up her monthly twenty-article limit on the Times's website until I neglected to log in on my new work computer.  Twenty articles is two days of reading in these parts!  But seeing as how it's a new month, maybe you'll spare a few credits for some things that I found interesting?

This article is apropos of a new resolution of mine, which is to stop saying "like" so much.  Though, the article is actually about how young women influence linguistics and only uses the preponderance of "like" as an example.  There's a podcast alongside the article that goes more in-depth; quotative "like" makes a lot of sense now!  My anti-like resolve may be waning.

Also, did you know?

The use of “like” in a sentence, “apparently without meaning or syntactic function, but possibly as emphasis,” has made its way into the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition — this newspaper’s reference Bible — where the example given is: “It’s, like, hot.”

Next up, I finally got around to reading this ode to pie by Sam Sifton, and it's inspired me to want to make pie on a daily basis (even if I am skeptical of the included crust recipe).

Introduce an apple pie . . . and watch what happens — as a result not just of the pie itself, but also of the process of making it. Apple pie is a weekend project to slow the baker’s heart rate and restore belief in happiness. The scent of fruit softening, kissed by cinnamon, of buttery crust, of sugar caramelizing — these can combine into a fragrance of redemption for the cook and everyone else. The taste delivers bliss.

 Maybe I'll finally get around to making these this weekend?

And for article three?  Well, this may not be worth using up one of your precious article allotments unless you're a theatre geek, but I'm very interested in seeing Wallace Shawn's adaptation of Ibsen's The Master Builder after reading this. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

“When I would read it in translation,” Mr. Gregory said, “there would be these brilliant passages, and then it would be completely incomprehensible and boring. I wondered if that was the play, which I doubted, or the translations.”

It was then that Mr. Shawn, the playwright and occasional “Gossip Girl” guest star, got what he called “one of the only clever ideas I ever had.”

He added: “I, being a very overconfident person, was not afraid to translate it from the Norwegian. Even though I can’t speak Norwegian.”

Finally, some respite for those of you squirreling away your NYT credits: an NPR article that Apartment Therapy alerted me to about the American Sofa.  It does my furniture-obsessed heart good.  I don't think that the author overstates the importance of the sofa in everyday life--we'd have a spotty record of Finley's life if we trashed all the photos of him on our couch.  Also, we love eating on ours so much that we've taken to bobbling bowls of soup on our laps to keep out of Finley's reach.

Some reading to while your Thursday away!  Fluff, admittedly--one of these days, I should have Andrew do a guest post to represent the other eight sections of the paper.  Guess you'll just have to stay tuned!