MASSAGE HERESY
10 years ago
April 3, 1998 | Sarah McNaught looked into why a local massage student was expelled from the Muscular Therapy Institute upon divulging that she was a professional dominatrix.
“Sheila, however, says there is nothing dangerous about her work, which involves various forms of erotic pain or domination.

THE ROMNEY DIET
5 years ago
March 7, 2003 | Kristen Lombardi delved into Governor Romney’s fiscal budget to see who would be hurt most by his balancing act.
“Even before advocates can sort through Romney’s plan and decipher where, exactly, human-services spending has been cut, they’ve noted that, for all the talk of his ‘commitment’ to core services, the governor still manages to balance his FY ’04 budget on the backs of the state’s neediest citizens.

Kate Harding — “a Chicago-based writer, editor, crazy dog person, humorless feminist, aspiring yoga teacher, recovering grad student, and blonde,” according to her blog — has ingeniously skewered the standards imposed by the Body Mass Index (BMI). What she has done is to post to Flickr a slideshow showcasing women (well mostly, anyway, there's a few men as well as a cat up there) of all sizes.

When I first heard about the idea of “leaf peeping,” I thought it was a joke. It was in an episode of Family Guy, as I recall, and as I had never spent an autumn in New England, I could only assume that the “hoards” of tourists who descend like Hellfire on the Northeast “to watch the leaves change color” was some kind of hyperbolic mockery of people with a severely bastardized concept of both nature and vacations…

One of the traditions at The New Yorker that has continued unabated by tables of contents, photographs, bylined Talks of the Town, and other heady incursions of late-20th-century magazining is the "newsbreak" -- the wry, lightly condescending filler blurbs at the tail end of select New Yorker stories in which the magazine's copy-editing staff, having plowed through its 3,000-word feature for the afternoon and availed of no better way to entertain itself, takes to excerpting the copy-editing malapropisms of lesser publications.