Sublime

through the game, Mary pulled out a five-dollar bill and, with great motherly solicitude, told me to go buy myself a hot dog and beer and to please get her a diet Coke. It was one of those moments to die for. After rent, five dollars is actually a significant percentage of her monthly budget. It was the unmatchable gift that only the poor are

“handsome and pretty and educated and white”, who, according to the Times, not only “believed they owned the world” but “had reason to”. She was from a Pittsburgh suburb, Upper St. Clair, the daughter of a retired Westinghouse senior manager. She had been Phi Beta Kappa at Wellesley, a graduate of the Yale School of Management, a congressional

This entire notion of “the perfect mom/wife/homemaker,” of the “nostalgic siren call for a return to Fifties-style homemaking,” is a considerable misunderstanding of what Martha Stewart actually transmits, the promise she makes her readers and viewers, which is that know-how in the house will translate to can-do outside it.