Apartment Choice

IN THE 1960s and ’70s, long before helicoptering emerged as a parenting style, adults had far less interest in looming over their children, frequently urging them to go play outside or downstairs. The netherworld to which these parents pointed was usually a recreation room or finished basement, clad insipidly in wood-veneer paneling and linoleum. Furnishings typically included a saggy sofa, a scratched ping-pong table and a built-in bar never used for mixing drinks; instead, the kids commandeered it as a make-believe store or a stage for puppet shows. Not even Dad’s novelty naked- lady martini stirrers lured him down once the children moved in. And the closest Mom got was to stand at the top of stairs and yell, “Supper’s ready! Wash your hands!” Perhaps these ratty rec rooms weren ’t worthy of House Beautiful, but the stints of physical distance they offered parents and offspring arguably benefited both in ways today’s airy cathedral-ceiling’d great rooms can’t. These days, peopl...

Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst - Now Where, Ellen? Some creatively restless people take up watercolor. Others seek temporary solace with a little retail therapy. Then there's Ellen DeGeneres . And then there's her $45 million, 17- acre Santa arbara estate . The comedian and real estate tycoon has done all she can to upgrade, enhance and furnish the 10,000-square-foot villa she and wife Portia de Rossi bought in 2012 for $26.5 million, so it's time to say so long. So what if the massive chunk of land and the Tuscan- style home overlooks the Pacific Ocean in one of America's greatest coastal communities ? Who cares if the natural setting includes olive trees and a Roman- style swimming pool ? There's plenty of other intriguing real estate fish for Ellen to fry. And has been Ellen DeGeneres' habit, she's now ready to sell this fantastically unique property and move on to a "blank canvas." Baby On Board Makes Lauren Conrad Rethin...

At the heart of the novel is a less sensational yet still unconventional story: that of two girls learning to make their way in the world, told with all the complication and unruliness of life, and also with an unspoken argument about what it means to tell a story like this. As children we experience the raw brute force of our feelings, but in the formative adolescent years , Messud told me, we learn how to be a person — ‘‘what it is to be a daughter, what it is to be a friend, what home means, what love means.’’ We learn these things by observing other people, but also from the stories that we hear: the books we read, the films we watch, the myths our culture teaches us. Yet the narratives for girls tend to be ‘‘dire,’’ she said, with violence at the forefront. With ‘‘The Burning Girl,’’ she hoped to write what she calls ‘‘a children’s book for grown-ups,’’ a book that acknowledges the inarticulable, even irrational power of emotion — an ‘‘animal thing’’ beyond understanding. It trea...