David: I need a haircut, Maria. I look like a duckling right now.

Maria: And a stiff drink, if you listened to that radio interview with Caitlin Flanagan, like we were supposed to. Evidently the women of America had calmed down too much since her last book, To Hell With All That, caused such a ruckus over what was widely perceived as the author's throwback and essentialist anti-feminist ideology. So not content to get people in a stir with Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker appearances, she's written a new one, Girl Land. Even the cover of which is pretty provoking.

All these moms are fine [...]

"Committed is an unfurling of Gilbert's profound anxiety about reëntering a legally binding arrangement that she does not really believe in. All this ambivalence, expressed in her high-drama prose, can be a lot to handle. (One generally doesn't indulge another person's emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex.)" -Ariel Levy on Elizabeth Gilbert on marriage, which is pretty much all you should need to hear to go a-clicking through.

"I met another guy who was funny and went to film school at NYU. He was twenty-two and had a tiny apartment on Great Jones Alley and I thought he might make a suitable boyfriend, or at least a suitable deflowerer. He was older, he’d done it before, and, I had been told, all men were dying to have sex at all times, so it would be easy enough to get him on board with my project. It was harder than I thought. He was eager to make out and grope, but to my surprise and disgust, he seemed very uneasy about engaging in actual intercourse once I admitted—in [...]

Did you catch the piece on writer/director/neck-lamenter Nora Ephron in this week's New Yorker? It's got some funny bits and nice moments, but there's really nothing earth-shattering or new in it. And yet? I read the entire thing, a rarity for me. Which leads me to the conclusion that, at this point in 2009, writer Ariel Levy may be the best practitioner of longform profile journalism in the business.

Close readers of this site will not find anything particularly new in this profile of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, but it is written by Ariel Levy, who is always a pleasure to read, so it is definitely worth your time. Enjoy! Meanwhile, back in Italy…

I expected to hate this little Ariel Levy New Yorker profile of Simon Doonan and his potter-husband Jonathan Adler (who I do not know and yet dislike intensely) and yet I found it utterly charming! Ariel Levy could basically feed me boiled rancid rabbit droppings and I would be like "unlike what I obviously expected, this is yummy?" Doonan's notable quotable: "If Virginia Woolf had had two days a week at the ham counter at Harrods, she mightn't have offed herself."