. . . the word “bicoastal”:

Eve Levine, a 34-year-old real estate broker, recalls fondly the five years when she was, as she calls it, “low-cost bicoastal.” Her primary residence was in Brooklyn — first Williamsburg, then Bushwick and now Greenpoint — but she also had an apartment in the Fruitvale section of Oakland, Calif., that she visited for long stretches.

The apartment, actually a warehouse, was really big and inexpensive, she said. Friends paid the rent, but Ms. Levine said she could come back whenever she wanted, because they were friends.

In the fall of 2005, she severed ties to her West Coast warehouse.

“If you are trying to build something, whether a career or a bank account, you need to make a choice,” she said.

These days, she is a host of a gathering in Williamsburg called Home Buying for Hipsters, at which she explains the idea of Tenancy in Common, a form of ownership that enables people to combine their resources to buy a house jointly instead of just renting together. It is popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, she said, and she hopes to bring it to Brooklyn, where there is a similar pool of young people who have a history of sharing apartments through their 20’s.

. . .

Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.

Other communities across the country also fit this bill, but what Brooklyn and the East Bay share is proximity to more cosmopolitan centers — Manhattan and San Francisco — where the “creative class,” many of whom are freelancers, can earn a living.

“You can make money in both cities,” Ms. Levine said. “Can you make money in Portland, Ore.? It’s a cool city, it’s got lots of hipsters, but can you make money?”

. . .

If there is an aesthetic credo to Brooklyn and the Bay Area, it is Do It Yourself, which connotes more than using an Allen wrench from Ikea. D.I.Y. can mean everything from wearing locally designed T-shirts to attending concerts staged in someone’s warehouse apartment, to riding a bike to work.

Several businesses that have opened in both Brooklyn and the Bay Area exemplify the aesthetic. One of them, Rare Device, a home furnishings and fashion store in Park Slope, sells felted throw pillows and “wildcrafted soap.”

And to think that I just dropped off a bunch of horrible stuff at the Goodwill. “Faster nostalgia” is the first sign of a sick culture:

In tribute to the year 1992, an elevated D.J. segued through records by erstwhile hip-hop artists like K-Solo and Apache and into dance music by Color Me Badd and Bobby Brown, while members of the crowd swarmed the bar and contorted in dated dance steps. Some participants took the theme particularly seriously, wearing vintage Polo sweaters, retro Air Jordan sneakers and chunky gold door knocker earrings.

A celebration of the urban culture of the early 1990s, the monthly party is known simply as 1992. Bouncing around downtown Manhattan clubs since August 2006, it has attracted celebrity guests like Jay-Z, the producer Jermaine Dupri and the music mogul Andre Harrell. Europeans, hankering for a slice of retrograde Americana, have taken the party to Paris and Amsterdam.

“If you don’t know the past, you’ll just follow the trends that are going on now,” said Stephen Barr, 26, of West Hempstead, N.Y., a designer of T-shirts that coordinate with Nike SB skateboarding sneakers. Tall, burly and bearded, he wore a vintage Polo ski jacket with a “1992″ patch on the breast pocket. A party regular, he said, “It’s more about camaraderie than meeting girls and all that stuff.”

While the shimmering synthesizers, leg warmers and asymmetrical New Wave haircuts of the 1980s have been alternatively ridiculed, revered and replicated, the early 1990s have remained an untapped source of retro lodestone.

. . .

Just as Mick Jagger’s skin-tight pants were resurrected as skinny jeans, fashions of the early 1990s find new life at the 1992 party. Revelers in their late 20s and early 30s in head-to-toe Ralph Lauren Polo mix with recent Fashion Institute of Technology grads in neon-colored jeans.

Retro-oriented scenes often wink at the cartoonish aspects of the era they celebrate, but there is little irony here. “The early ‘90 was the last good style moment in the past 10, 15 years,” said James Filsaime, a 20-year-old from Brooklyn who wore a pink, orange and green Sergio Tacchini windbreaker and turquoise jeans he admitted were “actually from 1991.”

The “-packing” suffix trend is something that must be quickly and quietly eliminated:

Though other areas of the city offer one or a few of these services, Union Square is becoming a one-stop destination for those who consider themselves health-conscious, eco-friendly and deserving of the kind of spiritual and bodily nurturing that in the past was mainly the province of spa vacations. If the meatpacking district is where you go to party, Union Square is where you detoxify.

“We call it the wheatpacking district,” said Lisa Blau, who with Amanda Freeman founded VitalJuiceDaily.com, an e-mail newsletter devoted to healthy living that they publish from an office in the neighborhood.

What’s next? Downtown Brooklyn as the Courtpacking District? The neighborhoods served by the 6 line now comprise the Seatpacking District? Will the area the Brooklyn Gun Court is targeting become known as the Heatpacking District? Can 8th Street keep up its reputation as the city’s Feetpacking District?

What first appeared to downtown observers to be an influx of chunky Midwesterners on some sort of semester-abroad program turns out to be employees of the new Googleplex:

From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners. The Condé Nast and Hearst corporations have their famous cafeterias designed by, respectively, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster; but Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.

The campuslike workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan.

. . .

Food is a major perk at the Manhattan Googleplex. Every Tuesday afternoon, tea with crumpets and scones is served. In the cafeteria a dry-erase board lists local purveyors of the ingredients in the meals like a sign at the Union Square Greenmarket. (Dry-erase boards are big in Google culture; ideas flow quickly).

All the free food has created a problem familiar to college freshmen. “Everyone gains 10 or 15 pounds when they start working here,” said James Tipon, a member of the sales team, who actively contributes to the four pounds of M&Ms consumed by New York Googlers daily. “I definitely gained that when I started working here, but I think I shed some of it,” Mr. Tipon said. “I try to be disciplined but it’s really hard.”

The psychological principle of hating in others what you most see in yourself, writ Sunday Styles:

For status-conscious New Yorkers, Saturday has become synonymous with hordes of pleasure dilettantes wearing gelled hairstyles and quaffing Red Bull, creating hourlong lines at clubs that city dwellers may line up for on Thursday or even Monday, but will not get within five stretch-Hummer lengths from on Saturday. Instead, Netflix and Vietnamese takeout sounds good, or maybe that new Bond movie. It’s a night that people accustomed to quoting Andy Warhol or Diddy may summarize by invoking another New York luminary: Yogi Berra, who said, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

. . .

Of course, the Saturday-shy New Yorkers who do go out on the town that night often do so with reservation — and reservations.

Last Saturday, four Manhattanites in their early 30s were huddling over a low table downstairs at Buddakan, the cavernous pan-Asian restaurant in the meatpacking district. “During the weekends, you get a lot of clutter, if you will,” said Brian Kirimdar, 30, an investment banker. He and his wife, Ashley, tend to hide out in restaurants on Saturdays, avoiding all but a few of the Chelsea clubs. “You don’t find too many bridge-and-tunnel people at Cielo or Marquee,” he said. “You really have to pick and choose.”

Indeed, it is no accident that clubs like Marquee, its upstairs V.I.P. room packed with models even on Saturdays, and Stereo, known for its Nikes-only sneaker policy, are more outsider proof.

“No cologne, earrings or hair gel,” said Michael Satsky, an owner of Stereo, standing outside the velvet rope of his club on West 29th Street around 1 a.m., explaining his weekend door policy.

Grup’s revenge; the cynicism of our obsessively narcissistic culture comes home to roost:

Magnolia, like other bands on the Union Hall bill — Care Bears on Fire, Tiny Masters of Today, Fiasco, Hysterics — is more than a novelty act. It is developing a following on New York’s burgeoning under-age music circuit, where bands too young for driving licenses have CDs, Web sites and managers.

“Oh my god, there’s like a huge, huge kid-rock scene here,” said Jack McFadden, known as Skippy, who booked the show at Union Hall. “It’s really very indicative of Park Slope, since so many of the parents who live around here are hip and have these hip little kids that they dress in, like, CBGBs T-shirts.”

. . .

More than a few of New York’s baby-face rockers have famous parents in the entertainment business, who have encouraged their children’s artistic streaks and served as role models for professional success. Lucian Buscemi, 16, the son of the actor Steve Buscemi, along with Julian Bennett-Holmes and Jonathan Shea, both also 16, have become something like the kingpins of the Park Slope kid-rock scene, ever since their band, Fiasco — previously known as StunGun — became the first youth band to play the Liberty Heights Tap Room.

. . .

The most prominent band on New York’s junior-varsity rock scene is Hysterics, a “psychedelic” quartet founded at the artsy St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn. The week after performing at Union Hall at the CMJ Marathon, the band members gathered at the studio of Jeff Peretz, their manager. Mr. Peretz also guides the Tangents, whose bass guitarist, Miles Robbins, 12, is the son of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

Members of Hysterics discussed their coming gig, a party for a new Valentino perfume, which was organized through a friend of the fashion photographer Pamela Hanson, whose son, Charlie Klarsfeld, 17, is the group’s guitarist. The evening, at 7 World Trade Center last Thursday, turned out to be a pileup of celebrity children with music careers, including the DJs Lola Schnabel and Mark Ronson.

“Are we going to get swag?” asked Josh Barocas, 17, the quiet bassist, whose enormous Afro speaks of a somewhat louder interior personality.

. . .

On a Friday evening in November, Ada, [Tiny Masters of Today] bassist, 10, a slight girl with a heart-shape face, was reading “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” at Piano’s, a Lower East Side bar, while waiting to go on with her brother, Ivan, 12, the lead guitarist. (Their father requested that the family name not appear in print to protect the children’s privacy.)

After the set, during which they performed, among other songs, Ada’s mournful “Pictures” — “It’s about my friends in second grade and how awful they were to me,” she said — an adult in the audience called the band “the new Raincoats,” a reference to an experimental British act of the late ’70s.

These people make Open Air Stereo look like middle-class heroes . . .

The game of Hipster Or Fresh Off The Boat? just got a lot harder:

I just got my bangs trimmed today,” a woman told her friend as they waited to enter Studio B, a new club in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “How do they look? Kind of like Jean Shrimpton, maybe? Just tell me that.”

Formerly a Polish dance hall, Studio B is now home to people who want to look Shrimptonesque — or at the very least, retro. A week and a half ago, the opening-night crowd was decked out in Members Only jackets, mod dresses and blouses with foofy neck bows — just like the crowd at every other neighborhood club. But Studio B has a lot of features that are local rarities, among them a brightly illuminated sign, large bathrooms, and a V.I.P. room with leather couches. Nice, clean leather couches.

And unlike its neighbors, Studio B comes with a night life pedigree: the D.J. Justine D. is the creative director, and Todd P., a well-regarded indie music promoter, will book some acts. The proprietors also own the Delancey on the Lower East Side and Studio A, a hipster rock nightclub in downtown Miami.

. . .

The owners have left many of the previous occupant’s fixtures intact; there’s a smoke machine and automated swirling lights that make the dance floor glow (O.K., it is a little Miami). Several patrons said it reminded them of the early rave scene — not always in a good way.

“It’s like the worst imitation of the 80’s,” said Bert Kietzerow, 39, a hairstylist who lives in Williamsburg.

Mostly, though, the retro vibe fits.

“It’s not slick or fancy, it’s cheesy,” said Leslie Hermelin, 27, a music publicist. It’s also enormous (9,500 square feet). At 1 a.m., when the Belgian D.J.’s Soulwax took the stage, the club was jammed, the dance floor a sea of pumping fists and flashing camera phones. Even Mr. Kietzerow succumbed to the beat and the fog.

“That smoke machine is so lame,” Ms. Hermelin said, “it’s cool.”

Latey we’ve been seeing examples of how the economics of New York City dictate that full-fledged, non-related adults live together, sometimes four to an apartment, regardless of one’s budget. Now we must revise this to say that there are actually full-fledged adults who are related but not sleeping together sharing living spaces, regardless of their budgets: “Sibling Seeks Same to Share Apartment”.

You might have assumed that siblings live together out of economic necessity but it’s actually more complicated than that:

While siblings have sometimes lived together in middle or old age out of necessity, some psychologists and researchers of sibling relationships say that young adult brothers and sisters who become roommates could be laying the foundation for a lifelong support system. Siblings are often close as children, become distant during adolescence and then increasingly reliant on each other as adults, through parenthood, career changes, divorce and old age, said Victor Cicirelli, a professor of psychology at Purdue University.

Kristin Meyer, 27, who lives in Brooklyn with her sister, Alessandra, 24, said she wanted to have her personal photos in her living room. “The only way to do that was to live with my sister,” she said.

Experts note the benefits of rooming with your sibling:

Self-selection assures that sibling-roommates are probably on solid footing to begin with, said Michael D. Kahn, an author of “The Sibling Bond.”

And when they don’t get along, siblings tend to resolve conflicts swiftly and bluntly. “I threw a bottle of Fantastik at her,” Kristin said of a recent time Alessandra angered her by using Windex to clean their kitchen table.

Still, there are clear disadvantages:

But sibling roommates might not be comfortable with each other’s casual relationships, making one less apt to bring that toothsome bartender back to their shared quarters. “The weirdness comes in when you’re potentially dating a lot of people,” Kristin Meyer said. “It’s not something you want your sister to know. If it’s a roommate, you can get away with it.”

And this is precisely why the evildoers hate our freedom:

There are times when a confluence of people find a way to become a sort of family. It can happen at summer camp and in college dormitories and at Internet start-ups. But in New York, where many people don’t know their neighbors and prefer it that way, 126 Rivington Street, where the residents eat together, often sleep together and live above a cupcake shop, is an anomaly.

Ever since Mike Dreeland, 32, moved into the second-floor apartment with two friends from Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vt., two and a half years ago and started having parties on his rear patio, the 102-year-old tenement between Essex and Norfolk Streets on the Lower East Side has become a cross between the shenanigan-filled apartment building on “Friends” and the drama-soaked fictional complex Melrose Place, 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles.

. . .

The 15 members of the 126 gang drink at Iggy’s on Ludlow or Whiskey Ward on Essex, eat at ‘Inoteca on Rivington (where they are friends with one of the chefs), buy birthday cupcakes at Sugar Sweet Sunshine on the ground floor, and wallow in one another’s personal affairs whether they like to or not. There have been at least six sexual relationships in the building, along with an untold number of angrily slammed doors and tearful reconciliations. As with “Friends” and “Melrose Place,” the central theme of this show may be: how long can one continue to enjoy the bacchanalian pleasures of youth before one craves a quieter adult existence?

How about not one more sugar-frosted minute?

On the top floor Hannah Long, 27, lives in an apartment that smells like incense and hot tea. A scorpion, a tarantula and several preserved beetles hang in display boxes along the walls. She is a satellite fixture at 126, traveling a lot, but as a self-described “serial neighbor dater” she is an intimate member of the group nonetheless.

Mr. Dreeland said that Ms. Long once telephoned him 15 times in a day. “It’s a little soap opera I’d rather my boyfriend didn’t know about,” she said, rolling a cigarette on the arm of a large wooden chair from Bali.

As for Mr. Dreeland, he now prefers to date people outside the building. Wearing a ski cap while watching Comedy Central in his apartment, he recounted the adventure of the night before, when he brought home what he described as an “urban cougar,” a woman over 40, he explained, who is attracted to younger men. Apparently this particular cougar didn’t turn out to be all that interested, he admitted.

To preserve whatever semblance of a social fabric that remains in this city, can we at least agree that we will never, ever repeat the phrase “Urban Cougar”?

(Sunday Styles Section, it had been a while — damn you for occupying so much mental space!)

This time, it’s actually a Thursday Styles story that makes you want to shit, piss and take out a machine gun and blow . . . Oops, was that out loud? “A Sense of Fashion is Lost in Transit”:

The cost of a transit strike to department stores and designer boutiques in New York during the week before Christmas and Hanukkah will undoubtedly be staggering. The cost to the greater cause of fashion could be even worse.

. . .

This week the strike began amid below-freezing temperatures, inspiring a few clever style strategies, but mostly a troubling assortment of faux pas. Some of them, like what appears to be a sudden outbreak of studiously mismatched winter accessories, are inexplicable in a city that should be accustomed to dressing for long stretches of cold weather.

“People are dressing like they work in outdoor booths at the flea market,” the designer Cynthia Rowley said.

. . .

. . . [T]he lasting trend is likely to be an incorporation of clothing designed for active lifestyles into business attire. Of the hundreds of bicyclists on the West Side Highway bike path and those walking their bikes across the Brooklyn Bridge, it was hard to guess where they were headed based on their spandex pants, Polar fleece parkas and towering layers of headgear.

Tony Melillo, the Generra designer, rides a bike to work year-round. He is befuddled by this sudden addition to the landscape, what he described as packs of riders wearing “weird, leotardy types of things and oversize purple Patagonia sweatshirts.” Mr. Melillo wears his own trim black sweat pants, a thin but heavy army-green coat from Burton and a baby blue cable-knit cashmere scarf from Charvet. His inspiration comes from the professionals, bike messengers who wear leggings under loose capri-length pants to avoid sticking in the gears.

Quick role-playing exercise: You’re the editor of the Sunday Styles Section — what cutting-edge phenomenon do you run with just after Fashion Week ends? How about a feature on the Spin Doctors? Why yes, of course! Of course:

“It sounds corny,” ["rubbery, cheerful frontman"] Mr. [Chris] Barron said. “But the music was calling out, saying, ‘Where have you been?’”

The affluent have co-opted the stoop party, leading some compatriots to sneer, “How ghetto.” The Sunday Styles section treads carefully:

As Lori Coats dropped into a folding chair near the stoop of her apartment building on West 21st Street, she let out a deep sigh. “This is fabulous,” she said, cradling her 18-month-old baby, Cate, in one arm and a plastic cup of sangria in her other hand.

Her neighbor Robert Walker nodded agreement as he appraised the picnic table set up with plates of focaccia and pasta salad next to a giant pitcher of homemade sangria. Two neighbors from 10th Avenue maneuvered awkwardly through the crowd perched on the stoop or on chairs. When Mr. Walker heard a favorite disco classic on the iPod hooked up to computer speakers, he said, “That’s my song.”

Long a tradition in Harlem, Brooklyn and working-class neighborhoods throughout New York City, the summer stoop party has been a rarity on streets of $3,000-a-month apartments and single-family brownstones in the heart of Chelsea.

Seriously, crank up your “jam box” and pop open an imported beer — it’s time to let loose:

It is not even necessary to have a stoop proper to have a sidewalk party. Josh Hughes and Brian Ermanski began inviting friends to daily afternoon outdoor parties in NoLIta in the spring, with seating on trash bins and benches. They crank up the Velvet Underground on a jam box and crack open their Negra Modelo beer in paper bags.

“In the middle of all those models and filmmakers and rich women heading off to eat at Cafe Havana, it definitely creates a small scene,” said Mr. Hughes, the author of “Punk Shui: Home Design for Anarchists,” scheduled for publication next year by Three Rivers Press. “But that’s a part of the statement we’re making, that we’re not above it.”

As for the “ghetto” slur — it’s not a question of “whether” but “how”:

Both Mr. Hughes and Ms. Coats said that passers-by at the gatherings on their blocks have sometimes muttered that partying on the street is “ghetto.”

One who passed by and formed that thought, Ron Robinson, a beauty-trend consultant, said it was not meant as a derogatory comment. “Growing up in the outer boroughs,” Mr. Robinson said, “this seems to me like a long-gone pastime which is reoccurring.”

“I miss it,” he added.

So it’s ghetto in a self-hating kind of way — I like it!

Just don’t tell Philadelphians that Williamsburg exiles see their city as one big undervalued slacker heaven:

“We got priced out of Manhattan, and we moved to Brooklyn,” said John Schmersal, 32, of the three-member band Enon; two of them migrated here in January. “Then we got priced out of Brooklyn. Now we’re in Philadelphia.”

On a recent Friday night Mr. Schmersal and his girlfriend, Toko Yasuda, were huddled at the bar at the Khyber, a smoky rock institution in the nightclub-heavy Old City neighborhood, a Colonial area of narrow streets bordering the Delaware River east of City Hall, to see Love as Laughter, a New York City band. “We like going to shows here,” Mr. Schmersal said. “In New York there are so many people, it’s impossible to even get in to see hot bands.”

Much less be in a band. “For years I was willing to sacrifice quality of life for artistic fulfillment - you know, you find a circle of artists and you scrape by,” said Anna Neighbor, a 27-year-old bass player and Williamsburg exile, between sips of Yuengling lager at a bar in the Northern Liberties neighborhood, an artists’ enclave north of City Hall. In January Ms. Neighbor and her husband, Daniel Matz, and Jason McNeely, all members of the indie rock band Windsor for the Derby, decided to leave Brooklyn.

Ms. Neighbor and Mr. Matz discovered Fishtown, a gentrifying blue-collar neighborhood adjacent to Northern Liberties, where, in the last five years, youthful faces with bed head have made their way among the traditionally Irish Catholic residents. They found a three-bedroom row house for $170,000.

“New York is mythologically all about vibrancy and creativity, but it’s hard to work a 40-hour week and come home and be Jackson Pollock,” said Mr. Matz, 32, a guitarist. He said that by living in Philadelphia he could support himself teaching public school and devote the rest of his time to his band.

If you feel that New York is an inappropriate place for your garden-variety Newfoundland or Irish Wolfhound, fear not — you can now rent pets, affording one the chance to simply return them before they slobber up the place:

Jared Wasserman’s parents aren’t wild about his current crush. One recent morning as this long-lashed 5-year-old sat tugging on his big toe in the pristine den of his parent’s duplex, he announced he had fallen in love. “I’d like to marry Rudy,” he said.

It is an interesting choice; Rudy is male and can’t talk. He is Jared’s hamster. Jared and Rudy, however, have not moved in together yet. This is because the parents Wasserman like having their home pet-free.

“I’ve never been an animal person,” said Jared’s mother, Marla Wasserman. “I could do without the flies.”

Rudy is part of a small population of pets in New York that can be leased or adopted part-time. He lives in a cage with Jared’s name on it on East 91st Street at the Art Farm in the City, an indoor petting zoo and educational center that is home to 15 kinds of small creatures like millipedes and cockatiels, all of which can be rented yearly for $100 (for a tarantula or a frog) to $300 (for a chinchilla or rabbit, which require more upkeep). In general they live at the Art Farm and make occasional visits to their part-time owners’ homes.

Before you stomp your foot and sigh, “What will they think of next?” know that renting pets helps fight against a particular sort of scenario:

Sean Casey, the owner and founder of Sean Casey Animal Rescue in Brooklyn, has adopted out everything from wallabies to alligators and currently has cats, parakeets, hairless rats and a dozen other types of animals ready for adoption or part-time foster care. He said corn snakes and rat snakes are the ones people ask for the most. Cats and dogs tend to be the animals that are returned the fastest because they require more work and training than people expect.

Mr. Casey said he tries hard to screen out anyone who might take animals for dishonorable reasons, but he cannot always be sure someone is not just taking a puppy for a day or two in order to pick up women in the park. “I’ve turned away people who say they want a snake for a few days so they can freak out their roommates,” he said. “Or one woman asked me for a bird temporarily because she felt her cat was bored and needed something to swat at.”

At certain perfect moments, the Times channels J.D. Salinger. This is one of those moments:

Occasionally, when [Art Farm co-founder] Ms. [Valentina] Van Hise feels especially comfortable with the part-time pet owners, she’ll let them take the animal home for a short stay. Jared and his sister, Alison, who live on the Upper East Side, were allowed to bring Rudy home, at no extra charge.

After struggling to get the cage into a cab and getting home, lots of pictures were taken of Jared, in pajamas, cuddling Rudy on the kitchen floor. Jared even asked his mom if he could have a farmerlike red-checkered shirt and a pair of overalls like the Art Farm caretakers wear. He brought the pictures to school for show and tell, and gave one to his teacher as a gift.

Then two days later Rudy returned to Ms. Van Hise.

“I just kept thinking how they’re part of the rodent family,” Mrs. Wasserman said. “When I brought him back, Valentina said, ‘You’re welcome to keep him longer,’ but I said ‘No, it’s time for him to come back here now.’”

You may have wondered what the life of a party planner is like. According to Marc de Gontaut Biron, when it is not overshadowed by preppie murderers, cocaine addiction or a gun-toting Christian Brando it can be “really, really nice”:

Since arriving in New York from Paris in 1983, Mr. Biron estimates, he has gone to seven or eight parties a week, and in his still thickly accented baritone, he registers offense when his math is questioned.

“You don’t have one party a night,” Mr. Biron scolded a reporter with less time behind velvet ropes. “You go to two or three parties a night, four or five nights a week.”

Mr. Biron’s schedule, last week at least, would seem to back him up. On Tuesday he stopped in at a roving party called French Tuesday, then met a friend for dinner at Balthazar. (He characterized the evening as a night off.)

On Wednesday he had dinner at Soho House in the meatpacking district, then went to Cain, a nightclub in Chelsea, where he stayed until the wee hours. Thursday night he gave a party at Fizz, a club on the Upper East Side. Friday he planned to play host to a table at Marquee, a club in Chelsea. On Saturday he was to preside over a table at Cain in Southampton.

At each spot it is Mr. Biron’s job to bring in 50 to 100 people who will buy cocktails by the bottle, for anywhere from $200 to $350.

Then again, the late nights and thousands of beautiful young European women can be occupational hazards in themselves:

While Mr. Biron meets women by the dozens, that creates another problem, keeping track of them. In his office he stood up from his chair, plunged his hands into his pockets and pulled out a clump of paper in each fist, business cards and napkin scraps with scrawled phone numbers. He opened his fingers, and the scraps fluttered onto his desk. “My God!” Mr. Biron declared. “Who are these people?”

The question hardly seemed relevant the next night at Cain, as the party reached its peak, sometime after 3 a.m. Mr. Biron leaned back against the banquette to survey the scene. Young women swirled around him. One in particular, dancing like a flame in front of him, caught his attention.

“She is hot, hot, hot,” Mr. Biron said, more with a connoisseur’s detachment than with any hint of lewdness. “The idea is to excite the people with the music and the beauty of the people. It’s a very superficial world, but it’s a very trendy world.”

Mr. Biron looked forlornly at the empty bottle of Absolut, and then at his watch. Four a.m. was bearing down on him like an out of control New York City garbage truck. He grabbed his blue blazer. It was time for bed.

“There’s a lot of parties tomorrow night,” he said. “A lot of parties.”

The bumper sticker showing where you summer is rubbing it in our faces and besides which, is totally obnoxious:

You might think it would be enough for someone who vacations in one of the elite communities of the Northeast to slip away quietly on weekends, to recuperate and laze in peace without heckling the less fortunate.

But certain vacationers, apparently, cannot fully enjoy themselves unless they lord their summer plans over those left to swelter in less idyllic realms. Look around on the Long Island Expressway on any Friday evening in summer, and you’ll see Range Rovers by the dozens ghosting by, bearing small oval European-style bumper stickers that announce in clipped code the drivers’ destinations: EH for East Hampton, SGH for Sag Harbor, BH for Bridgehampton. Stroll the Upper East Side, and you’ll see the hot item this summer is a canvas tote bag by Steven Stolman, embroidered with the numbers 11968. Don’t know what that means? Why it’s the ZIP code for Southampton, you poor soul.

Pretty straightforward, right? Not so fast, bub — it wouldn’t be a Sunday Styles Article That Makes You Want To Flee New York without some tidbit that sheds light on all that is truly disturbing about the 7.5 percent that can afford what the Times advertises:

Perhaps the most arcane version of this game, played among the old-money residents of East Hampton and Southampton - and by those who want to be perceived as old-money residents - is the battle to obtain prestigious telephone exchanges for summer homes. Certain exchanges - 283 in Southampton and 324 in East Hampton - have been around for decades, while exchanges like 259, 204 and 907 were created more recently. Eighty percent of the numbers in the Blue Book, the social directory for established Southampton residents, are 283 or 324.

Andrea Ackerman, the manager of the Southampton and Sag Harbor offices of Brown Harris Stevens, the real estate brokerage, said that it is common for buyers of old Hamptons homes to ask sellers to include the older telephone numbers. And for some newer residents, getting stuck with a new-money exchange is a gnawing source of shame.

“I hate to say it, but I’m a 204 guy,” said Jason Binn, the chief executive of Niche Media, which owns the Hamptons and Gotham magazines, and a relatively new Hamptons homeowner. “It was something I had to face up to.”

Not so much a Sunday Styles article that makes you want to flee New York but rather just feel much pity for it: a first-person account of the world of competitive air guitar.

This may be the most disturbing thing you’ll read in a very long time:

I know the glory of dressing up and fanatically playing an invisible instrument in front of a crowd is not something that everyone immediately grasps. When I tell people I’ve spent more than two years as a competitive air guitarist, they often look at me bewildered, like a dog tilting its head at an unfamiliar command. Or they just laugh at me.

It has been a few years — we are obviously way past due for another annoying term describing stylish straight men!

In any other paper, paragraphs such as this might be considered offensive — good thing we’re reading the Times’ Sunday Styles section:

Of course there are still places that gay men will go that straight men will not. The Speedo swimsuit is still off limits to even the most vain heterosexual American men, as is knowing the words to Kylie Minogue’s latest hit single.

As to the term itself, we are being purposely vague lest it becomes popular.

The Times goes a long way in investigating a pet peeve of ours: the conspicuous weekday idling of the idle rich:

New York is a city of professionals and predawn discipline, an empire meant to be conquered not by wanderers but by the lusty achievement of the hyperemployed. Languorous weekday afternoons are the province of those deemed to be lacking in power.

Still, a fair portion of the city’s employable population can be found, midweek, far from any office, whiling away the hours in restaurants and cafes. Unlike the corps of freelance writers with their laptops, these loiterers do not appear to be engaged in any income-producing work. Call them flâneurs, if you want to romanticize them with a French name. Some are princes of leisure, who clearly have never learned that a bank account may approach zero. Others are conscientious objectors to the rat race, who have decided that their personal freedom is worth more than the compromises that might gain you a flat-screen TV.

All of them - superrich, rich or merely upper middle class - have somehow inoculated themselves against the fiscal anxiety that drives most unemployed people to try to get a job. And they have enough disposable income to afford the minimum entry (a cup of coffee) into one of the precious places that allows low-revenue loafing.

The Times identifies three categories of Loafer: the sons & daughters of the superrich, who really should hide themselves; American Dream-worthy refugees from the rat race who live off of earned income, e.g., the fortunate beneficiaries of the 1990s tech bubble; and unlikely retirees, generally those who put in excrutiatingly long hours in their 20s and 30s in order to walk away from it all in their 40s.

Hearty big-cheer props to the Times for looking a little deeper into this — next stop, the trendy outer-borough cafes which I continue to scratch my head over when I see them packed in the middle of the day.

Jennifer 8. Lee investigates the notion that men going out to dinner with each other are secretly homosexual:

The delicate posturing began with the phone call.

The proposal was that two buddies back in New York City for a holiday break in December meet to visit the Museum of Modern Art after its major renovation.

“He explicitly said, ‘I know this is kind of weird, but we should probably go,’” said Matthew Speiser, 25, recalling his conversation with John Putman, 28, a former classmate from Williams College.

The weirdness was apparent once they reached the museum, where they semi-avoided each other as they made their way through the galleries and eschewed any public displays of connoisseurship. “We definitely went out of our way to look at things separately,” recalled Mr. Speiser, who has had art-history classes in his time.

“We shuffled. We probably both pretended to know less about the art than we did.”

Eager to cut the tension following what they perceived to be a slightly unmanly excursion - two guys looking at art together - they headed directly to a bar. “We couldn’t stop talking about the fact that it was ridiculous we had spent the whole day together one on one,” said Mr. Speiser, who is straight, as is Mr. Putman. “We were purging ourselves of insecurity.”

Anyone who finds a date with a potential romantic partner to be a minefield of unspoken rules should consider the man date, a rendezvous between two straight men that is even more socially perilous.

. . .

Although “man date” is a coinage invented for this article, appearing nowhere in the literature of male bonding (or of homosexual panic), the 30 to 40 straight men interviewed, from their 20’s to their 50’s, living in cities across the country, instantly recognized the peculiar ritual even if they had not consciously examined its dos and don’ts. Depending on the activity and on the two men involved, an undercurrent of homoeroticism that may be present determines what feels comfortable or not on a man date, as Mr. Speiser and Mr. Putman discovered in their squeamishness at the Modern.

Both Sex and the City and Seinfeld are long gone but it’s not too late to coin glib terms for New York City culturo-athropological phenomena:

Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie “Friday Night Lights” is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not.

“Sideways,” the Oscar-winning film about two buddies touring the central California wine country on the eve of the wedding of one of them, is one long and boozy man date.

She of course conveniently forgets that the technical term for two or more men being out “on the eve of one’s wedding” is “bachelor party.” Nothing to see here, move on: Gentlemen, rest assured, your manhood is intact.

The good news is that someone finally has legitimized hooking up by publishing a handbook on the topic.

The bad news is that this means young women are setting benchmarks for what constitutes being a slut:

For the young and the single in New York dating has always been a numbers game, whether it is tabulating the guy-to-girl ratio at a bar or guessing at the bank balance of the quarry across the dance floor. Still, it is not every night that a group of unattached young women in low-slung jeans sit around pondering questions that might stump a mathematician at Caltech, questions like can one plus nine ever equal just nine?

“I know a lot of people who will go home with the same guy they have before just because it’s not going to raise their number,” explained Jennifer Babbit, 26, a publicist.

“A lot of my friends will say: ‘I started having sex with this guy, but it only lasted a minute. I don’t know if it counted,’ ” offered Beth Whiffen, a former associate editor at Cosmopolitan.

. . .

Yes, there are conquests, but there should not be too many of them. So among this group of women with three-inch heels tipping out of their $200 jeans what is the right number, that is, the last number before you hit the wrong one? Few women would want to go over 20, or even 15, Ms. Babbit said, because they would “think of themselves as big sluts.”

“Ten at the most,” Caroline Homlish, 24, summarized in a tone that brooked no dissent.

And while the good news is that girls aren’t so hung up on that commitment thing, the bad news is that they’re still hung up on the commitment thing — and now it’s explicitly likened to shopping:

And while “The Hookup Handbook” explicitly forbids its readers to mistake a hookup for a potential boyfriend, not everyone thought that was realistic. “People who are hooking up are trying to get into a serious relationship,” insisted Caitlin Gaffey, 24, a beauty assistant at the magazine Shop Etc. “On the girls’ side, that’s almost always true.”

“You can’t just hook up with anyone,” added Ms. Gaffey, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to learn a lot about him before you hook up. Guys are not picky. We’re the ones who are picky. It’s kind of like shopping.”

The good news is that thanks to such handbooks, vodka and sex are explicitly linked. There is no bad news to report on this front:

Ms. [Kate] Kilgore [who is in public relations at Victoria's Secret Beauty] estimated that out of a random group of 10 women her age, only two or three will have a steady boyfriend, and the pressure that existed even a decade ago to be seen having a boyfriend had lessened. That, she said, is liberating. “I’ll go through phases where I’m hooking up or making out with a guy a week,” she said matter-of-factly, “but then go a month” without.

She guessed that on average she probably hooks up 10 or 12 times a year, something that can mean “lots of vodka, feeling the connection,” but not always sex.

“It’s all about fun,” Ms. ["The Hookup Handbook: A Single Girl's Guide to Living It Up" author Andrea] Lavinthal added of her approach to dating. “It’s not the death of romance. It’s like relationship light. No one’s going to say no to making out with a cute guy on a Saturday night.”

The good news is that these women are cautious of the “disease thing.” The bad news is that they refer to it as the “disease thing.” Everybody, all together now — “sexually transmitted disease.” Still, thank goodness no one’s being irresponsible here:

But while the language of the hook-up culture sounds debauched (”Drink Till He’s Cute” is one chapter heading), most of the women who will plunk down $14.95 for the book are children of the 80’s. These girls grew up just wanting to have fun but knew not to have too much.

“We’ve had so much sex ed,” Ms. Lavinthal said. “With strangers, we are really cautious of the disease thing.”

In Manhattan, where guns and steak are now “quirky,” the red-state revolution is nearly complete:

Among the artifacts hanging on the basement walls of the Westside Rifle and Pistol Range in Chelsea - frontier reward posters, a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” blurb about a stylish, bulletproof suit - is a picture of Robert De Niro in “Taxi Driver,” sighting down the barrel of a pistol in a scene filmed at this very range.

Used to be, a vigilante psycho had someplace to go in this town, somewhere to practice. Pity Travis, then, were he to walk into the range on a Tuesday night last month and find Gina DeMasi, 25, a SoHo bartender, decked out in a cowboy hat, shiny belt buckle and tight blue jeans tucked into her boots.

Dianne Mackley, her friend from MercBar, was also outfitted à la prairie party girl. Across the room a group of middle-aged men in trucker hats, members of the Chelsea Gun Club, quietly ate McDonald’s takeout and cast periodic glances at the interlopers.

“I like things that are quirky,” Ms. DeMasi said. Then a gunshot boomed from the next room, and she flinched.

. . .

An instructor gave each student a .22-caliber rifle, helped the students load the guns with a 10-round magazine, and led them to the range with its 16 stalls. The shooters clipped targets to a rope that swept the paper downrange with the turn of a crank. The smell of cordite soon grew thick, and the spent shell casings clinked off the counter and walls and floor and shoes.

When they were finished, they took their targets and walked outside to hail a cab for Frank’s.

“I do need a drink,” Ms. DeMasi said in the back seat.

Sunday Styles sociologizing Mary-Kate Olsen’s thrift-store motherlode:

As fall turned to winter and edged toward spring, Ms. Olsen, 18, pushed her version of ashcan chic to emphatic extremes, an evolution charted by glossy magazines that snoop on stars in everyday activities. The look became dottier and dottier, until it morphed into a kind of homeless masquerade, one that was accented by subtle luxuries like a cashmere muffler, a Balenciaga lariat bag and of course her signature carryout latte from Starbucks.

Ms. Olsen is a fashion pauvre, and so is her equally funky twin, Ashley (the other self-made millionaire N.Y.U. freshman). Their style would seem to mark them as front-runners for Earl Blackwell’s worst-dressed list. In fact the twins are trendsetters for the latest hipster look. They are influencing the same generation of girls and young women who fell for them as wholesome child stars, buying their Mattel dolls, and who later, as tweens, spent $750 million a year on denims and pastel tops from the mary-kateandashley line at Wal-Mart.

“The Olsens are the real thing,” fashion role models for a generation entering adulthood, said Karen Berenson, a stylist who works in New York and Los Angeles. She is unfazed by Mary-Kate Olsen’s widely publicized admission last year to a clinic to treat an eating disorder and her continuing recovery. “She makes skinny girls in baggy clothes look cool,” Ms. Berenson said.

Teenagers and young women have long taken style cues from celebrities, of course. But the sway of the Olsens is especially surprising because it is a radical swing from influences of recent years, like the flamboyantly sexy, skin-baring style of Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson, as well as the heiress look popularized by Paris Hilton.

Just months ago, “stylish young women used to wear Gucci or Prada head to toe,” Ms. Berenson said. Today they are more apt to be seen at supermarkets or parties toting a beat-up Chloé bag, their eyes shaded by enormous, high-priced Laura Biaggiotti sunglasses, the faint suggestion of opulence hidden beneath chadorlike layers of cashmere and ankle-length peasant skirts.

David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which forecasts fashion trends, was in Las Vegas last month at a fashion trade show. “The trendiest, coolest people were wearing things like a chiffon skirt with fur boots,” he said. “It looked like they had gotten dressed in the dark.”

The new look has acquired a name: Bobo style. “You know, bohemian bourgeois,” explained Kathryn Neal, 28, a freelance writer in New York, who is partial to billowing Alexander McQueen pirate shirts worn with beat-up jeans.

Quick quiz: The most obnoxious clause is A) “the faint suggestion of opulence hidden beneath chadorlike layers of cashmere and ankle-length peasant skirts,” B) “She [who is being treated for an eating disorder] makes skinny girls in baggy clothes look cool,” or C) “. . . who is partial to billowing Alexander McQueen pirate shirts worn with beat-up jeans”?

Tough call. I say D) All of the Above. And that’s just in the opening paragraphs!

Question Two: The statement most lacking in self-awareness is A) “These days you just feel stupid and shallow walking around with a $1,000 bag”; B) “On a social level Bobo is very New York City. It’s a way of showing that you have no boundaries, that whether you’re at a party on Park Avenue or in an East Village bar, you can jump into anything, cross over into any kind of group and be accepted”; or C) “It’s perfectly fine to look like a bag lady”?

Close, but B) wins out for most grotesque example of lacking self-awareness. For kicks, substitute “East New York” for “East Village bar.” There. I hope to God this person was misquoted.

It may not rise to the level of the kind of Sunday Styles article that makes you want to flee New York, but it’s almost as obnoxious. “Six Figures? Not Enough!”:

There was a time not long ago when earning six figures was a significant milestone among upwardly mobile professionals. If you were young and single in one of the nation’s big cities, you could live in a building with a doorman, drive a European car, eat at fine restaurants and vacation in Jackson Hole. For married people it meant a suburban home and college savings accounts for the children.

Beyond the lifestyle, $100,000 was a psychic achievement; it meant joining the meritocratic elite. The prospect of “six figures” kept white-collar workers toiling for 20 years, confident that hard work would be rewarded and that the American social contract was securely in place.

Certainly $100,000, which is more than twice the national median household income of $43,527, is still a princely wage in most of the country, placing you in the top 5.2 percent of American wage earners with full-time jobs, according to the 2000 census. Even in New York City, only 7.5 percent of full-time workers make that much. But $100,000 isn’t what it used to be. It has been devalued, in the practical sense by inflation and psychologically because it is now a relatively common salary for newcomers in fields like law and banking. For today’s executive strivers in the more affluent cities, there is a new grail: $200,000.

When you read these sort of Sunday Styles articles, you inevitably wonder who these people are; it seems that everyone but you (and the writer) are in on the joke. But now we know — these articles are aimed at only 7.5 percent of the city. It’s then that you realize that the article is riding that thin line between obnoxious and mocking. And this time we’re on the safe side of mockery! See in particular:

“It’s the new black,” said Bill Coleman, senior vice president in charge of compensation at Salary.com, an online career service based in Needham, Mass., that tracks executive pay. “There’s a lot of bunching between $100,000 and $150,000. That’s the vast majority of the people who used to aspire to $100,000. Now they are aspiring to $200,000 or $250,000.”

“It’s the players,” he added, echoing a common sentiment, “who make $200,000.”

Where does the money go? It’s easy:

Adjusted for cost-of-living inflation in the New York metropolitan region, a $100,000 income in 1987 would be worth about $170,000 today. And yet it still seems that another $30,000 or more is needed to be a “player.” Part of the explanation may be the almost perverse escalation in the price of commodities favored by upwardly mobile professionals: whether $170 Diesel jeans, which have replaced $30 Levis; $3.95 lattes from Starbucks versus 25-cent coffee from a deli; or the must-have $449 iPod that supplanted the must-have $75 Sony Walkman of the Reagan years.

To think that people once paid $75 for a Walkman — it just boggles the mind. And with that I’ll slink back into the humdrum hand-to-mouth existence of the other 92.5 percent of the city . . .

It’s official — The Christmas Tree Man is the New Carhartt Guy:

Once a year, something magical happens in New York. The metrosexuals, the unemployed artists and the unattainable are brushed aside. For five short weeks, the real men are in town. The Christmas Tree Men. They hail from Montreal, upstate New York and even Brooklyn. They are rugged and good-looking, and if you hurry, you might still find one packing up the remains of the holiday.

Some women like them because they are reliable. “He is there when I leave for work and when I get home at night,” Sara Booth, a filmmaker, said of the blue-eyed Canadian she often saw on her way to the A train from her Washington Heights apartment. “I don’t always know where my boyfriend is, but I always know where he is.”

Lindsey Schaeffer, a teacher who lives in the East Village, found them a pleasant break from the pressures of the usual dating scene. “They see me in sweat pants going to the gym,” she said, “and they still smile at me.”

They are almost too good to be true. “Not only is he nice, burly eye candy, but I know he has a job,” said Lisa Green, a graphic designer. For a holiday fling, you can’t ask for more.

Approaching a Christmas Tree Man is easy. Bring an offering - coffee or a slice of pizza will do. Remember, they are cold, hungry and would probably love to take a shower in your apartment. (After all, these are guys often known for sleeping in their cars.)

Of course, Jen notes that this story is old news: “Who among us hasn’t swapped spit with a Christmas Tree Guy?” Who among us, indeed!

See also: Carhartt Guy, as per Sunday Styles.

The Real Men are in Town:

Not sure if this rises to the level of the Sunday Styles Article That Makes You Want to Leave New York (like other Sunday Styles articles in the past — see below for more on that), but it comes close. This time it’s non-Jews using the Jewish online dating site JDate to score hot Jewish singles:

[D.] Coppola, 22, a real estate salesman from Brooklyn, is looking for a confident, intelligent and open-minded woman who shares his love of walks in the park, sushi and home cooking. He had some luck meeting women through Internet dating sites like AmericanSingles.com, but they were rarely good matches. Then he found what he now considers an online gold mine — JDate, a Web site that bills itself as “the largest Jewish singles network.”

Although he is Catholic by birth and upbringing, Mr. Coppola has long preferred to date Jewish women. “If a girl walks by in a bar, and I’m attracted to her, it always turns out she’s Jewish,” he said. “My friends say I have Jew-dar. I thought I’d go with the odds.”

Mr. Coppola is one of a growing number of gentiles who have lately signed on to JDate, which was established in 1997 as a service for bringing Jews together. The number of non-Jews on the site is difficult to estimate: 50,000 of its 600,000 members identify themselves as religiously “unaffiliated,” but they include Jewish members who don’t want to identify themselves as “secular” or with any particular sect. But interviews with people who use JDate suggest that gentiles have become an increasingly visible presence in recent years (full disclosure: this reporter is one of them) on a site that was designed to promote mating within the tribe.

The article goes on to note that generally, one’s reasons for using JDate “seem to come down to the old idea of the nice Jewish boy or girl”:

Agnes Mercado, a Catholic administrative assistant from West Hollywood, had never even met a Jew until she immigrated from the Philippines 15 years ago. But in October, a little over a year after the death of her Jewish boyfriend of 13 years, she placed an ad on JDate that read, “I am a gentile looking for my mensch, are you out there? I want to be your shiksa and your partner for life.” Ms. Mercado, 40, said that her late boyfriend had been “a kind soul” and that she believes his Jewish upbringing gave him a good character. She has just started seeing a 44-year-old Jewish man she met through the site, and is willing to convert if things get serious. “If I have kids, I would want to raise them Jewish,” she said. “It’s so ancient and full of traditions that make sense to me.”

. . .

Traditional stereotypes are alive and well, according to Robin Gorman Newman, the author of “How to Meet a Mensch in New York” (City & Company, 1995) and a dating coach with several non-Jewish clients who say they prefer to date Jews. “A lot of girls think that Jewish guys know how to treat women, so they want one,” she said. “On the flip side, non-Jewish guys think that Jewish women will take charge and make their lives easier.”

I’ve heard intermarriage equated to something along the lines of “carrying out what Hitler failed to do.” Some sound similar warnings with this particular JDate phenomenon:

To some Jews, of course, the issue of intermarriage is not at all funny. The most recent data available, from the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-2001, show that 47 percent of Jews who married after 1996 chose a non-Jewish spouse, an increase of 13 percent from 1970. If the trend continues unabated, some fear, it could lead to the end of the American Jewish community.

Jonathan D. Sarna, the author of “American Judaism: A History” (Yale University Press, 2004) and a professor of the subject at Brandeis University, argues that while gentiles who marry Jews may embrace Jewish traditions and pass them on to their children, such commitment is unlikely to last more than a generation in a mixed family. “Jews are much more in danger of being loved to death than persecuted to death,” he said.

And although some Jews object to non-Jews using J-Date (”Get your own site!”), the goyim seem unperturbed:

Mr. Coppola, the real estate salesman, said no one has ever admonished him for being on a site created to encourage Jews to meet and marry other Jews. Still, he does not advertise his background in his written profile.

Because he is not Jewish, he lets women contact him. “I respond, ‘You probably figured out by now I’m not Jewish,’” he said, adding that his status as a gentile has not seemed to be a problem: he has gone on about one date a week since he joined JDate a year ago, and has had several monthlong relationships.

But Mr. Coppola concedes that he does sometimes wonder if he is trying to become a member of a club that does not want him. “I feel a rabbi is going to knock down my door because I feel I’m doing a disservice to Jewish culture,” he said.

Now, on that category of Sunday Styles Article That Makes You Want to Leave New York. I remember two big ones. The first was “Where the Girls Are, and the Commute’s Easy” (blog post, abstract link), in which Manhattanites did the reverse Bridge and Tunnel commute to look for mates in Williamsburg — “earthy” artists who were also “Carhartt Guys” who (working from memory here) will cook you tenderloin for breakfast. Ugh.

The other article, “Partying Like it’s 1999,” (reprinted story, abstract link) dealt with unemployed Wall Streeters who supplemented generous severance packages with unemployment checks, using them to party on Monday nights until 4. They called themselves the “405 Club,” after the $405 weekly unemployment checks. I know at least one lifelong New Yorker who pointed to these two articles in particular as part of why she wanted to leave!