Recommended reading

Traditional media usually does an awful job of documenting the intricacies of modern dating. So the NY Times did something wonderful -- they held a college essay contest on the topic of "Modern Love" and are publishing the five best submissions. The winner, "Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define" by Marguerite Fields, a junior at Marlboro College in Vermont was published today. Field's piece is brilliant and heartbreaking at the same time:

Sometimes I don’t like them, or am scared of them, and a lot of times I’m just bored by them. But my fear or dislike or boredom never seems to diminish my underlying desire for a guy to stay, or at least to say he is going to stay, for a very long time.

And even when I don’t want him to stay — even when he and I find each other as strangers and remain strangers until we stop doing whatever it is we are doing — I still want to believe that two people can meet and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other noncommittal slogans.

--from, Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define

Also, Angelenos know that LA Weekly food columnist Jonathan Gold is THE. BEST. RESTAURANT. REVIEWER. IN. THE. WORLD! Seriously, he's incredible. Check out, "Keep on Trucking: Notes from the taquero resistance" about the battle to save LA's beloved taco trucks. Warning, you're gonna get hungry for some tacos.