"Beauty is a responsibility like anything else, beautiful women have special lives like prime ministers but I don't want that."

The writer and painter Leonora Carrington was 33 and a very beautiful woman when she wrote that line in The Hearing Trumpet, a book that is, among many other topics—alchemy, the Holy Grail, the perversities of nuns, the difficulties of getting goats and wolves to live together—also about being very, very old. This was in 1950; her best friend was a Spanish painter named Remedios Varo.

In the book, Carrington appears under the alias Marian Leatherby, who is 92 and has a beard. She has no [...]

A series about foods we miss and our quests to recreate them.

A few years ago, on a trip to Edinburgh, I had an elderflower drink that I keep thinking about. I don't remember what it was specifically called on the menu—cordial, elderflower water, or some variant—just that it was so cool and refreshing that it seemed weirdly magical on that day. It was a late afternoon in November. My husband and I had been to this little graveyard in the old part of the city (martyrs, moss) and then stopped into a restaurant nearby. It was too early to be having dinner but that's the nice part [...]

Carrie: Jane, remember when the world was new, you were dewy-eyed and I was not yet so haggard, and "House of Cards" had only just become available for streaming on Netflix? It seems like years ago, but it was only last Friday.

Jane: Now it's a week later, Spandau Ballet's "True" is playing in this cafe, and if we were sitting together, I'd probably be telling you not to Bogart the whiskey. We've passed binge-viewing, Carrie, to re-watching, to you using "House of Cards" characters as verbs ("how much will I Peter Russo myself in the morning if I do this?"), to me looking up which of the series' actors [...]

• Last night's Charity Wine Auction: Two guests kidnapped from elevator as they're leaving the party.

• Liberty Project benefit dinner: Wife of a Supreme Court nominee reveals to assembled guests that her husband beats her, is crooked judge.

• Thanksgiving dinner: Victoria discloses to guests that at age 15 she was forced to shoot a man and take the blame for his death.

• Second wedding to Conrad: Groom toted off by police during the reception.

Today is Nick Rhodes' 50th birthday. He's the youngest member of Duran Duran, so they, the pretty mascara-ed wild-boy new romantics, are all safely embarked on their 50s now. They remain pretty (and I'm not just being polite, they do), and Nick hasn't stopped wearing mascara and I hope he's pleased every day with all the new de-clumping formulas available, but still, it gives you vertigo. Do the jumpsuits still fit? Does John Taylor ever avoid invitations to go out so he can stay home and watch Veronica Mars? Does Simon LeBon say to friends at dinner, "Lately if I drink more than two glasses of red wine, I [...]

Today would have been David Foster Wallace's 50th birthday, and if you'd like to mark it, here are some things that might interest you to read (or watch) and revisit. The list isn't intended to be comprehensive; for that there's the Howling Fantods, not to mention this, this and that. This is more like an old trunk, some favorite things that got packed away and today's maybe a nice day to take them out and rummage around a little: Remember when Frank Bruni peeped inside DFW's medicine cabinet? etc.

Once upon a time (last December), we went out looking for a managing editor for this website, and we met a ton of amazing people. Long story short: we now want you to meet Carrie Frye, who has written and edited previously at About Last Night and Asheville's Mountain Xpress. She can be reached at caaf at theawl dot com.

Hi and hello! I completed orientation over the weekend ("Core-ee Seek-a") and now it's just a thrill to be sitting here at a desk with my Awl stapler and pen set, filling up the calendar with items that, while we're enjoying a mood of excessive first-week politeness, the [...]

When editors and sponsors demanded changes to his copy, the legendary absurdist comedian and radio star Fred Allen used to reply: "Where were you bastards when the pages were blank?"

This joke is about the common misconception about what really happens between writers and editors, which is a kind of alchemical collaboration, provided that the collaborators in question are in sympathy and closely attending to the matter at hand. Granted, that doesn't happen every time, on either side, but at its best there is no hostility, and no jockeying for an advantage in this symbiosis: no ego, no performance, just an intent shared focus on making something good together for [...]

Carrie Frye: Maud! I rented Thelma & Louise a few weeks ago, and it was, weirdly, only on rewatching that I realized why every so often I get an irresistible urge to rent an aqua convertible, conscript a few female friends for the trip and just drive… south, west, wherever: it's because of Thelma & Louise! It should have been the obvious source of the daydream, but I had lost track of the full extent to which this movie had hardwired my brain. It's been 21 years since it came out—it is now old enough to walk into a bar and order a Wild Turkey straight up and a Coke [...]

Carrie Frye: Jane, so I was lazing around Saturday morning when I saw a series of ecstatic tweets from you about the amazingness of "House Of Cards." Up till then I'd only been paying dim attention to the show's release (basically, I knew it was a series released on Netflix about Washington politics that, disappointingly, did not seem to feature any secret vampires), but on your word, I tried an episode at lunch. And then, next thing I knew, "Portlandia" Battleship Galactica marathon style, it was dusk… and then it was 10 p.m. and I had no circulation left in my legs.

I'm now on episode 7 and view [...]

When my friends started having children, as much as I thought about what role I'd play in their kids' lives, it was as the sort of friend of the family who, when you're teetering through teenagerdom and your early 20s, takes you out to lunch or dinner (often arriving, fortuitously, when you're most off course and down-at-heel), gives you Rilke and Asimov and the Brontes at the junctures when they can do their most good, takes your ambitions seriously, lets you be yourself while providing some calibrating sense of what the world at large will eventually expect from your conversation, etc. I had a couple such 'aunts' myself, my mom's [...]

Do you suffer Computer Back? I do. Mine is caused by the terrible habit of hunching over the laptop while also curling my legs under the chair in a sort of corkscrewed position that is osteomuscularly nightmarish but somehow conducive to concentration. When I stand up I look like a stooped, slightly concerned turtle. Now, lots of people have Computer Back, and nearly everybody with whom I've talked about it has, at some point in the conversation, brought up the fact that Philip Roth works at a standing desk. That tidbit, you'll remember, came out in a 2000 David Remnick profile, and it apparently haunts the imagination of everyone [...]

111. Frankenstein's Monster (Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus) 110. Uriah Heep (David Copperfield) 109. Casaubon (Middlemarch) 108. Bradley Headstone (Our Mutual Friend) 107. Samuel Pickwick (Pickwick Papers) 106. Gussie Fink-Nottle (Right Ho, Jeeves) 105. Keith Talent (London Fields) 104. Jerry Cruncher (Tale of Two Cities) 103. Hercule Poirot (The Mysterious Affair at Styles) 102. Ham Peggotty (David Copperfield) 101. Thorin Oakenshield (The Hobbit) 100. Tracy Tupman (Pickwick Papers) 99. Julian Malory (Excellent Women) 98. C.J. Stryver (A Tale of Two Cities) 97. Charles Arrowby (The Sea, the Sea) 96. Dr. Watson ("A Study In Scarlet")

In 1816, a young doctor named John Polidori was offered the position as traveling physician to George Gordon, Lord Byron. Polidori was saturnine, caustic, ambitious, well-educated and handsome. He had graduated from medical school at 19 (as unusual then as now) and this offer came not a year later. Over the objections of his family, he accepted. Polidori had literary ambitions; here was an amazingly famous poet asking him to join him on a tour of the Continent. It must have felt like fate was tugging him along. In confirmation of how well things were going, a publisher offered him 500 pounds to keep a diary of his travels with [...]

Carrie: How smart of Netflix to release its series a week before a historic blizzard hit the Northeast. I wonder how many people who had no intention of ever watching this show ended up reluctantly streaming it this weekend, because it was that or the 9th rewatch of All About Eve or Grizzly Man?

Jane: Now, I don't think one could ever watch Grizzly Man enough times, but beside the point! (If Netflix ever wants to release a 13-part Herzog meditation on chaos and murder, though…) Did all of Netflixing NYC spend the weekend colluding with Frank Underwood? Inversely, when hysterics about snowfall (along with attendant talk of "House of [...]

Mary Toft was 23 when she gave birth to her first rabbit. Other rabbits—six, seven, eight of them—followed. It was 1726. Toft lived in Godalming, a small rural town in Surrey; news of the births skipped its way to London, and the king's anatomist was dispatched to investigate. He was unimpressed with Mary, describing her as "of a very stupid and sullen Temper." Nevertheless, after witnessing a rabbit birth himself—the 15th!—he returned to London convinced of the extraordinary, preternatural nature of the births. (And why not, amazing things happen to stupid country people all the time: they're sold magic beans, they haul talking fish out of the water, they give [...]

1. Elizabeth Taylor as Helen Burns in the 1943 version of Jane Eyre.

The movie, which had Orson Wells as Mr. Rochester and Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre, was made when Taylor was 11. It was filmed right before National Velvet made her famous. Just a year before, a casting director at another studio had complained, "Her eyes are too old, she doesn't have the face of a child." About this role, a biographer writes: "So tiny was her part, as one of the classmates of young Jane (Peggy Ann Garner), that she got no billing on the credits; and years later when she wanted her own [...]

Last night Park Slope Food Coop held its monthly members meeting. At 7:26 p.m., senior Reuters Opinion editor Chadwick Matlin began live-tweeting the proceedings; two hours and 14 minutes later, "meeting is adjourned." It's difficult to pick a favorite here but "In europe I have been using the biodegradable, and they degrade so fast by the time you're at checkout you don't know where the bag is," "'but my collards won't fit!' — one of the actresses in the silent film PSA," and ""My name is Robert Dow. No relation to Dow Chemical." have to be contenders.

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Tell me, Muse, of the men and women of many ways, who were driven far journeys, after they had fled Madison's shining Capitol. Hard was their exile amid the labyrinth toll roads of northern Illinois, many their adventures, narrow their escape from the wild monster Rahm, new king of Chi-town, who is said to rip the fucking heads off men and devour them. Speak of the bloating effects of Endless Pasta bowls, the huddled iPhone calls with constituents at wind-swept gas stations, and these brave heroes' diligence in keeping up with the email streaming ever daily through their state accounts. Then caught up, here, goddess, begin our story on [...]