Don’t Send Me Your Cash-Grabbing Graduation Announcement

How parents make the childless pay.

When I graduated high school, back in the Paleozoic Era that was the '80s, my parents did not throw me a party. In fact, they didn't even take me to dinner. (I went with a friend and her family to the old 94th Aero Squadron in the far Northeast, which to us seemed like going to France itself—how fancy!) My folks did show up at the actual ceremony, though I recall even that was a game-time decision. I won a few awards, including one from the local VFW for citizenship, which I hoped was due to the fact that I had badgered the suitably apathetic girl sitting next to me in advisory all through high school to lustily recite the Pledge of Allegiance during assembly. Returning the favor, she printed the entire Pledge in my yearbook.

Now That We Have Facebook, Let’s Kill the Family Newsletter

Hint: No one cares that your son is good at science.

I have to admit, at first I thought it was a joke. The email came with the subject line, “The Smith Family Quarterly Report” (well, not the Smith family—I am changing names to protect the guilty, for reasons which will become obvious shortly) and was from a distant cousin I had bumped into during Easter dinner out with my parents. I come from a stereotypically large Irish Catholic family, so it's not that unusual to come face-to-face with people who somehow share my bloodline but whom I know barely, if at all.

American Idol Is the Most Important Show on TV

Even with a tired format, the show still brings generations together to watch.

Tonight, the seven remaining contestants on American Idol will each belt out two tunes in their continuing quest for singing stardom, and tomorrow night one of them will go home. (The judges are able to “save” one contestant from elimination each season, and last week they elected to do just that, for teen diva Jessica Sanchez.) Next month, the last one standing will be showered with confetti as he or she predictably dissolves into disbelief and tears, and then move on to a recording career that may or may not make them popular artists on your radio dial.

America Could Use Fewer Standing Ovations, More Booing

Why we can’t just stay in our seats and clap.

If you've been watching American Idol this season (and I am just outing myself here and telling you I have), you know that the quality of contestants this year has been judged by most observers of such things as a marked improvement over the last several editions. Tonight, the top nine contestants will forge on in their pursuit of reality-television glory, singing songs from the '80s, which pretty much guarantees that DeAndre Brackensick will deliver an ear-shattering rendition of “When Doves Cry.” But the leonine DeAndre had a pretty good week last week: He got a standing ovation from the judges. So did four of his other competitors. That means half of the contestants—including the guy who got voted off the next night—motivated the panel to rise from its chairs in raucous applause. Watching, the only thing I could think was, Simon Cowell would have never gotten out of his chair for that. In fact, in the nine seasons he was on the program, I can only remember one occasion when Cowell rose to give a standing ovation for a performance.

Our Dishonest Society Could Use the Scarlet Letter Treatment

LOI stands for "lack of integrity."

I've been thinking about Hester Prynne lately. You may remember Hester from junior-year English lit. She is the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, an 1850 novel about a young woman living in Puritan Boston in 1642 who is shamed by her community for allegedly having an adulterous affair. (She is forced to wear a scarlet “A” for adultery on her clothes to own up to her sin.) Even today, the book remains a powerful metaphor for the corrupting influence of faux morality and judgement in society, a sort of “let ye without sin cast the first stone” lesson that still packs a wallop.

You Watch Television? How Very Lowbrow of You.

Modern Family is for losers.

I was at a dinner party on the Main Line two weeks ago with a group of people I didn't know that well.  And like most people in such situations, I spent a good amount of the time simply trying to get my bearings, to adapt, because what I tend to talk about when I am in a living room in Haverford is not exactly the same stuff I talk about when I am visiting my parents in their brick twin in the Northeast. (“How was dinner with the fancy people?” my mother will ask when learning of some social engagement I have just attended.)

The One-Percenters Are Back to Building at the Shore

From Longport to Stone Harbor, beach towns are changing—and that’s a good sign.

Signs the traction of the economic recovery is taking hold: less volatile swings in the stock market, better employment figures, the daunting wait list at Vetri. But if you really want to see where the economy is roaring back, take a gander at the skyline down the Shore, where the cranes have returned—and we’re not talking birds.

Who’s Ready to Tweet Lindsay Lohan’s Funeral? #SoSad

You know, now that we’re done Facebook-grieving Whitney Houston.

I don't know if you heard, but Whitney Houston died. If by chance your response to that statement was, “No, I hadn't heard,” please let me know how the cave decorating is going. Because there can be no other reason other than a primitive domicile far away from the civilized world that would explain how one avoided the avalanche of public mourning for the pop diva, who turned up dead in a bathtub in Beverly Hills a week and a half ago and was buried, with considerable pomp and circumstance, in New Jersey this week.

Bitterness Loves Company on the Internet

How can a magazine profile of one Main Line woman inspire such vitriol?

The reviews are in. I wrote a story in this month's Philadelphia magazine. Perhaps you saw it. It was a profile of a woman named Amy Burnham, who lives on the Main Line and circulates in the peculiar social orbit that exists out there. I do a lot of stories, for this magazine and others, writing about different people who do all sorts of different things. But every once in a while, I pen something that just makes people insane, for reasons I usually don't completely understand. But the story comes out and the heavens open up, and down pours a thunderstorm of consternation, condemnation, and finger-wagging indignation.