One minute I am having hot lattes with two girlfriends at a coffee shop in Georgetown, the next I feel an unfamiliar hand on my shoulder. The man with a Mac laptop from an adjacent table, who knows one of my friends and has his other hand on her shoulder,...

It feels like déjà vu. Metropolitan Home is the latest decorating magazine to go under the guillotine.

Only yesterday Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. announced the closure of the magazine fondly known as Met Home to the urban, sophisticated home decor cognoscenti.

December 2009 will be the last issue...

Last year my eight-year-old son R.J. showed me a bird's nest in our silver maple. The wide-girthed tree crowns our modest backyard, an earth-bound shelter for suburban fauna, scrappy squirrels, toothsome chipmunks and commonplace feathered friends.

I decide the nest belongs to robins. Not because I saw anything through...

I was caught red-handed. The paper cup gave me away, the ugly coroneted vixen with the cloven tail.

I volunteer on the Teacher Appreciation Week Committee at my son's public elementary school. For one week each year, we honor the school staff: organizing a breakfast and a luncheon, arranging for...

I confess. I am the pea shoot who broke the giant's back.

Earlier this week, as Conde Nast Publications declared Gourmet magazine, the grande dame of gastronomic glossies, toast, I experienced guilt.

No, I had not been late night snacking on fistfuls of Ghirardelli chocolate chips, but I...

"I'm washing the dishes after dinner," announces R.J., my nine-year-old son, out of nowhere.

My husband Ron's fork freezes midair.

"G-r-e-a-t," I say in a measured way, going for perfect phonetics rather than shocked stutter. After all, there is a first time for everything: first smile, first word, first step...first...

The green wheels of reform regained traction in Iran over the weekend.

Things had been relatively quiet since the inauguration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Even Mir Hossein Mousavi, the former leader of the opposition whose campaign color was green, had kept a low profile. Bickering had turned inward. Out...

Sad new travels fast, but I missed it yesterday. Baseball, homework and pepperoni pizza took precedence for me, the mother of a growing boy. Today, as I scrolled my Facebook news feed, something I do after drop-off at school, an item caught my eye. It was a black-and-white YouTube of...

Everyone has a Dirty Dancing story. This is mine. In the mid-80s, a year out of Oxford University and a year into an investment-banking career at Manufacturers Hanover in London, I decided to dance. I quit my job, packed my bags and moved to Los Angeles. I wanted to cut...

I'm in love with another man. Let me call him Daniel. We met last summer in the South of France, in Provence to be precise, exactitude being something he approves of. I would like to say we bonded in an outdoor cafe over buttery croissant and café crème, or at...

Street fashion in a vibrant green hue played an inadvertent yet memorable role in the political turmoil that followed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial reelection. In-house squabbles continue behind closed doors in Iran and open-Web debates continue on social networking sites across the world. The one thing largely undisputed is...

"Mom, may I please print something?" asks R.J., my eight-year-old son, in his sweetest, most innocent voice.

I have my hand stuck up a bird feeling for giblets.

"Sure," I reply.

I hear the hum of the printer and yank the giblets out. A little while later, the...

"Mom, don't go. I'm worried."

My son R.J. knows exactly where I am headed -- and he is nervous.

"Honey, there's nothing to worry about," I reply. "People do this all the time in America."

Earlier, I had told him and my American husband that I planned to skip...

With ever-tightening restrictions on international press organizations in Iran, social networking sites have continued to play a critical role in imparting news from and about Iran. The other day, one of my Facebook friends, who posts YouTube and Twitter updates around the clock, wrote, "Mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted. And...

Last week as Iran's Tweet-A-Thon raged on my Facebook, an unrelated post caught my eye from an American Facebook friend, "Green twitter pictures are stupid as f***." I knew my friend did not know what the green images meant. But his comment made me stop and think.

Since the...

I am a child of nowhere--at least I thought so until this week. Though born in London and educated at Oxford, my heritage is Iranian. Both my parents are from Tehran, where I also spent part of my childhood. I immigrated to Los Angeles in 1985, later married an American...