Michele Herman

Not all that long ago, an editor at a website that covers green architecture and sustainable design called me about doing some writing for them. We had a pleasant conversation, and then, before saying goodbye, I asked for her phone number. Awkward pause. Just use this number, she said. Awkward pause. I’m on a landline

Let’s talk shampoo, a conversation that I think is long overdue. For years I bought mine from Arrojo, a local salon, in jumbo plastic containers. The products had none of the bad stuff—parabens, phthalates, synthetic fragrances—and I figured one big container uses less plastic than several smaller ones. Then the algorithm started to feed me

In 1984 I took an oddball part-time summer job with a company that created newspaper indexes. My first task every morning was to call an obscure office at The New York Times. How many dots? I would ask. The voice on the other end would give me a number ranging from zero to four, and

Spring 2025. I head over to the median strip of West Street at Christopher to participate in a small weekly “action” I’ve just learned about. I choose a hand-lettered sign from the organizer’s bag that reads HONK IF YOU LOVE DEMOCRACY. For the first time since elementary school, someone hands me a tambourine. Goldilocks-like, I’ve

When I was a kid, I had a dream, a wonderful dream. I would dress up in my parents’ clothes or my toy-store tutu, bound into my parents’ bedroom, fling open my arms, yell ta-da and do a little song and dance. Before long, shyness and trouble singing on key knocked the budding entertainer right

The kid working the counter at my local West Village hardware store had an unlit cigarette in his mouth the whole time I picked his brain about the silver-plate wearing off our flatware. This was a year or so after I innocently used the liquid dip-it silver polish after a lifetime of the pasty kind

I’m aware that some people cringe at the thought of attending a literary reading. Otherwise sophisticated people have even been known to sneer at the very term reading, particularly when prefaced with poetry, in that voice Giuliani used when he described Obama as a community organizer. But hear me out. Readings—prose, poetry or both; with

I went down to the Surrogate’s Courthouse on Chambers Street to check out an exhibit called New Visions of Old New York, which promised an interactive 3-D map of New Amsterdam. Spending a little time in the 17th century seemed like a great idea here in the 21st, which is feeling more and more like

One day last August my husband and I took a walk in Gansevoort Peninsula Park and came upon the exercise station. We’d been spending our evenings on the sofa in awe watching teeny, hipless, shimmering Olympic gymnasts launch themselves into space and twist and somersault up there, and leap onto bars several stories high and