To read an article, click on the article title (e.g., “Sex on the Spectrum”).
New Jersey Monthly
Watching Michelle van Boerum and Tom Sandfordt as they stroll hand in hand, heads bent together in eager conversation, even a casual onlooker would peg them as a loving couple. In fact, van Boerum, 28, and Sandfordt, 46, have been together for more than three years, but they radiate such intense pleasure in each other’s company, you could easily imagine they’d just met. . . .
The New York Times
“When Pain Persists After Breast Cancer”
I could hear the anxiety in my sister’s voice. A week after her double mastectomy and breast reconstruction for breast cancer, she had developed a burning sensation under her right arm where her surgeon had removed several dozen lymph nodes for a postoperative biopsy. The throbbing and itching were so intense it felt, she said, “like poison ivy lit by a blowtorch.” . . .
Coastal Living
At 8 o'clock on a Sunday morning, New Jersey's Ocean City boardwalk is humming. Bikes and surreys, their striped awnings fluttering, coax a percussive tune out of the weathered boards. . . .
CoveyClub (coveyclub.com)
My father was a jingle writer, spinning the fervent claims of advertisers, from Ford cars to Flintstone vitamins, into catchy commercial music. Even today, a half-century after Mad Men ruled New York, lines from his compositions rise up randomly in my memory and stick there stubbornly. “Little girls have pretty curls, but I like Oreos.” “Chipsters, the hip chip, with a taste that’s like today.” And the lyric that’s particularly hard to erase from my mental mixtape: “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better.” He wrote that jingle for Clairol, and even at 17, I saw it for what it was: a cynical enticement to buy hair dye. . . .
Sarah Lawrence
The young man in the film could be any mother’s son. Fresh faced and energetic, in jeans and a white fleece jacket, he tells his story with a quiet urgency, in the kind of English we tend to think of as unaccented. But if his accent doesn’t betray much about his upbringing and ethnicity, his words instantly relate a story that’s both personal and, for a certain kind of American, universal. . . .
Parents
“Why Play Is Important in Preschool Classrooms”
On a typical day at a private New York City preschool, the students are very busy. During reading periods, they work on phonics and blended sounds and practice writing upper- and lower-case letters. Math lessons focus on addition, subtraction, and graphing. And audio recordings help them hone their comprehension and pronunciation during French lessons. . . .
New Jersey Monthly
“Off the Air: Vin Scelsa Signs Off”
It’s the kind of news that could induce a bad episode of cognitive dissonance: On March 28, Vin Scelsa—the uber-pioneer of free-form radio, the impish perennial kid with the fedora and the funky eyeglasses—announced his imminent retirement after 47 years as a radio rebel. For his fans, it was a little like learning that Peter Pan had bought a condo in Boca and was taking up shuffleboard. . . .
FamilyFun
“We Love the Jersey Shore!” (stories with the “LGP” signature are mine)
Ocean Grove: You’ll find more Victorian architecture in this historic one-square-mile beach town than anywhere else in the country, but for a true marvel of living history, just follow Pilgrim Pathway north until you reach the soaring Great Auditorium and the colorful “city” of 114 canvas tent homes that surrounds it. . . .
Rutgers
Alex Masket sleeps in a room with blue wall-to-wall carpeting, an unremarkable bedroom set, and tape. Duct tape. Electrical tape. Lots and lots of tape. In soaring swaths of color, it covers every inch of his bedroom walls, forming an emphatic, dimensional collage that’s as compelling as a Mondrian canvas. . . .
New Jersey Monthly
Tama Matsuoka Wong is plying me with weeds, and it appears to be working. We’re sitting on her shady patio in Flemington, gazing at a sunlit meadow and tossing back cocktails whose dominant note is yellow sweet clover, a wild plant that often makes its home in abandoned fields. . . .
The New York Times (Travel)
“A Georgia Island, Mostly Wild”
In 1566, when the Spanish first dropped anchor off Cumberland Island, they found themselves in a place of almost primordial beauty. Broad white-sand beaches and fecund salt marshes of an impossible green ringed a dense forest of live oak. The island's salt-water sloughs and freshwater lakes supported hundreds of species of migratory birds and the inner forest was home to mink, bobcats, deer, armadillos and a small group of peace-loving Indians known as the Timucua. . . .
NJ Home
Call it serendipity or kismet or—as Steven Kassin does—a fluke, but if Kassin and his father hadn’t been out for a stroll in Loch Arbour one chilly spring Sunday in 1995, the trajectory of their lives might have been very different. That day, the pair found themselves contemplating a “FOR SALE” sign posted in front of an old cabana club built right on the beach. . . .
Luxury Magazine
Two thousand years ago, the Romans interrupted their conquest of Britain to take a soak in the naturally warm waters at Aquae Sulis. The invaders were so enamored of the palliative hot springs that they erected a decadent bathhouse at the site—which the Britons would later rename Bath—alongside a temple to the goddess Minerva. Since then, the hedonists among us have been reveling in the world’s natural spas . . .