To be five years old is to be surprised by life. I'm amused by my children's awe at quotidian things - a toy helicopter, a bubble bath, the visible tentacles on a plate of calamari. And I'm envious of their ability to attain something I often can't: a state of transcendence induced by art.

Rumaan Alam

Life Art Years

Baking is a matter of precision and timing, but I just make things up as I go.

Us Up Timing

When my husband and I first became parents, we joked that our chubby baby was destined to grow into an Alex P. Keaton Reaganite - the most unlikely, and therefore hilarious, course for the child of an interracial gay couple in gentrifying Brooklyn.

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Yin Us Up

Does a bona fide chimichurri have cilantro in it? Who cares? Cooking for your family, unless your family includes Joel Rubouchon, is liberating in that regard.

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Family Car Your

Parenting is love, sure, but it's as much about receiving love as it is giving it. Parenthood is a kind of vanity.

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Parenting Love Vanity

To be five years old is to be surprised by life. I'm amused by my children's awe at quotidian things - a toy helicopter, a bubble bath, the visible tentacles on a plate of calamari. And I'm envious of their ability to attain something I often can't: a state of transcendence induced by art.

Rumaan Alam

Life Art Years

Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon.

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Time Waste Tiring

Truly smart people and truly smart dressers share one thing in common: They make it look easy.

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Art Truly Thing

Parenting advice is mostly useless because every family is uniquely its own; artistic advice is mostly useless because every artist works in their own way. Thus, figuring out how to balance the two has an intense specificity.

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Work Parenting Family

If you've ever watched a television cartoon, you know that kids don't appreciate subtlety, though perhaps that's because they're not often offered it.

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Car Art You

Fiction is just lying.

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Yin Us T

Time is a finite resource.

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Time Tim T

Checking your phone during dinner is no less rude than reading 'People' during dinner, which I once saw a woman do at Blue Ribbon Brooklyn as she dined with her husband/boyfriend/whatever.

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Your You Woman

History is a story like any other, but black history is a story so devoid of logic that it frustrates the young reader. The young readers in my house, told of slavery and segregation, asked in disbelief, 'What? Why?' We - the parents of black children, the parents of all children - still need to tell that story.

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History Young You

Is deciding what you like an instinct, a sense that arrives as swiftly as my autoimmune response to cat dander? Or is it the result of reasoned consideration, the way wine tasters swish pinot noir around in their mouths, spit it out, and reach for complex metaphors about chocolate and tobacco?

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You Wish Wine

Shot glasses make me think of youth and a mode of drinking and living that was never mine, even when I was the age for it.

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Age Youth You

Fashion has underscored the interchangeability of men for a long time, maybe from the outset.

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Time Men Change

Writing takes gall. I like to think that's true even for writers with several books under their belt, writers who have been doing it for years. It takes something - guts, gumption, self-delusion - to ask for a reader's time when we all know there's nothing new under the sun; that it's all been said, or written, before.

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Time Years Year

It comforts the adult conscience to remember that, amid history's grave injustices, there were still great lives.

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Science History Great

I don't have a Winslow Homer or a Renoir, but I do have the liberty to live as I like.

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Home Wins Win

I have a theory that because my kitchen is small, you can't preheat an oven and deal with dough at the same time, although maybe it's just that I'm a bad baker.

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Time You Wit

Subtlety doesn't work with kids.

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Because the designers at Baby Gap and Crew Cuts have determined it would be cute if kids dressed like their dads, seemingly every American male between 2 and 52 dresses identically.

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Children's books deal in idealized worlds, so they're a document of how our notion of ideal worlds has changed over time.

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Children's picture books are a unique record of social evolution: in gender roles and racial politics, as is much discussed, but also in fashion and interior design.

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I am a binge reader, with a tendency to throw myself at a writer, immerse myself in their work.

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Instead of a passion for the Yankees or fly-fishing or birding, I want to pass on to my sons a love of books, music, and art. I accept that this is partly about the gratification of my own ego, but it's also one of the only ways I know of making a rich life. That's what we all want for our progeny.

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Every sense has the power to transport us through time, but it's taste I find the most mysterious, and writing about it often results in tortured metaphors.

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For a long time, I thought that I was an enlightened parent by virtue of being an enlightened person. What a fool.

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If writing really is empathy, then understanding your place in society might actually help you achieve it.

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I don't want the staggeringly wealthy Elton John and his family to represent the standard of gay fatherhood any more than straight people want the stunningly beautiful Angelina Jolie and her family to represent the standard of heterosexual parenthood. Stars are outliers; stars are exceptions.

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I didn't know, at 22, that everything that happens to you, the good stuff as well as the less-good stuff, accrues and becomes your life.

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I think it's a not-uncommon experience for gay boys, young men, and even older men to spend a lot of time in the company of women.

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With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women.

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That a friendship ends doesn't mean it was weak from the outset; that it ends says nothing about its importance.

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Writer's block is a fiction.

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Form ossifies into genre through repetition.

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One of the many American ideals that make no sense at all is that we're all a million rugged individualists marching in lockstep. We dress accordingly, at least the men. If it's always been thus, I yearn for the halcyon days of the man in the gray flannel suit because at least that guy had some flair.

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I know I've had a charmed experience of being a parent, with healthy kids, a helpful partner, access to good day care, and great public schools.

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Among this country's enduring myths is that success is virtuous, while the wealth by which we measure success is incidental. We tell ourselves that money cannot buy happiness, but what is incontrovertible is that money buys stuff, and if stuff makes you happy, well, complete the syllogism.

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Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner.

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Children are weird. I was going to say 'most children,' but I think this a rare universal law.

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I mourn for the kind of dad I didn't have; I rue my first broken family while taking joy in the one that I've made.

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It is true for my family and many others: Adoption has made us infinitely richer in the ways that matter most.

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Lindsay Hatton's novel 'Monterey Bay' so beautifully evokes the landscape of the titular locale, you'll feel transported to Northern California even if you're reading it on the bus on your morning commute.

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In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.

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Everyone on Twitter - everyone on the Internet - seems so damn certain. Brevity doesn't allow for nuance, and it's a nice complement to confidence.

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I didn't know, at 22, that regret is useless. If I could go back and change something - give myself some big break, pass along some secret information, reassure myself that most things would, in fact, work out - I don't think I would.

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Class is very, very fertile territory for American artists, and it has been for a long time.

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Men's fashion's tendency toward uniformity promises little fun, but at least it offers this: If I wear sweatpants and sneakers, I can pass as the American it's safest to be.

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I married the man I love when the state of California said I could. We made a family through adoption, as New York State said we could. From the outside, our family - two dads, two sons via adoption - seems like an experiment, but what family isn't an experiment?

Rumaan Alam