• Middle Ages

    I wonder (hope?) there will come a time when I no longer get references to Brooklyn things. I’m also confused about so much romanticizing by people who were like 16 when this bar opened. 

  • Middle Ages

    When I was 30, I thought I had everything sussed out. I thought I knew everything. Then I hit 40, and I looked back at 30 and thought, ‘What a clown. I knew nothing.’ I thought I was ancient at 40, but now I’m 50 and I realize I was really just a young woman.

    Shirley Manson, while drinking martinis at Musso & Frank’s!
  • Middle Ages

    Kids These Days

    Like the darts Zink tosses in conversation and in writing (a friend’s novel “has weaknesses you could drive a truck through”), her life story feels exhilaratingly reckless: a childhood in tidewater Virginia with unspecified traumas; college at William & Mary followed by stints as a bricklayer, secretary, musician, and zine publisher; two doomed marriages, one to a poet in Tel Aviv; 16 unwed years in Germany; a Ph.D. in media studies from Tübingen; and a correspondence with fellow bird-watcher Jonathan Franzen that led circuitously to her current and possibly strangest phase: middle-aged enfant terrible.