LONDON, United Kingdom — In Britain, horse racing is wildly popular. Millions of fans — including Her Majesty — pack the nation’s racecourses every year to watch equine athletes and their riders compete.

But this season, the Sport of Kings is embroiled in a heated debate over the jockey’s most iconic tool: the whip.

Read more . . . 

...The next weekend, we go to Ikea for the first time. More specifically, we go to Ikea for the first time together. In every relationship, there is one person who enjoys Ikea, and another who thinks it is a big blue and yellow Abu Ghraib of the soul. I like Ikea. When I moved into Justin’s apartment in New York, I found him sleeping on a bed that could more accurately be described as a pile of broken bed parts with a mattress flung on top. The mess could have easily been reconstituted into a bed with a $10 part that Justin refused to purchase, because doing so would require a return visit to Ikea. 

I prepare for our visit with the diligence of a Secret Service advance team. I determine the closest of greater London’s four Ikeas (Edmonton), studiously compare cots and bookcases, measure walls and rooms, and compile a shopping list organized by category. The goal of all this prep work is to expend less of our time (and Justin’s patience) on operational matters and more on marveling at cartons of 99-pence doodads.

And the plan works, for the most part. On the day of our visit I consult tags, make notes and cross-reference, while Justin pushes the stroller and breathes in a way that resembles the relaxation exercises they showed us in birth class. We are ok, and then we realize that the van is due back in an hour and a half, and that Lily needs to eat, and that we still have to procure our purchases from the giant joyless warehouse part of the store. In the dim-lit aisles we load a dolly with boxes whose weight suggests the amount of marital discord contained within, Then comes the checkout line, which looks exactly like passport control in a developing country: disinterested checkers slowly processing lines of tired-looking people pushing overloaded carts with the defeated, desperate look of those who have come too far in their journey to turn back. We emerge with a Hensvik cot, a Stuva dresser/shelf unit, an assortment of clever nylon boxes to organize Lily’s toys, and an Expedit bookcase.

The Expedit bookcase comes in two oblong boxes, each of which weighs as much as a collapsed star. On each box is a decal bearing two cartoons. In the first panel, a vaguely human shape with a frowny face and a hammer stands before a jumbled pile of boards. This image is crossed out with a decisive X. In the next frame, the humanoid has made a friend, and the smile they exchange over the pile of boards means that assembly of this product requires two people. I know one thing about these mute genderless persons: they are not married. Because if they were, Ikea’s graphic designers would be legally required in a third panel to render the rage, frustration and recrimination that comes with building the Expedit bookcase with the person you love.

Justin hates building Ikea furniture only slightly less than he hates actually being in Ikea. He does not enjoy assembling things, not when he could honor the talents and training of a local craftsman by paying him to do the work for him. He is upfront about this. I love building Ikea furniture. Transforming a pile of particle board and screws into a piece of furniture with at best a five-year life expectancy makes me feel like God molding man from the clay of Life. In my heart, there is only marginal difference between the family heirloom cradle my great-great grandfather carved in Italy 100 years ago and the one I pieced together one afternoon with an Allen wrench. Exactly five days after we moved to London, a Harvard Business School professor published a paper called “The ‘IKEA’ Effect,” which said that consumers love the things they buy more if they have to put in a little bit of labor before they can use them. People crack an egg into a bowl of powdered corn syrup and convince themselves they’ve baked a cake from scratch; I push a drawer front onto a wooden dowel and fancy myself an artisan. I am just as unhandy as Justin, but I believe that I’m not, and this, I realize, is about one hundred times more insufferable.

When Lily goes to bed that night we tear open the boxes and spread the Expedit’s guts across the living room floor. The arguments begin instantly. A completed Expedit will fit neatly into the space along the wall (I know, because I measured it!) but there is not enough floor space to lay it flat during assembly. Furniture must be moved. After a cursory glance at the directions, Justin begins hammering and screwing with grim determination so that he can get this over with as soon as possible; I refuse to proceed until I have parsed every step of the directions (or “specs,” as I secretly and sadly call them in my faux-contractor head).

Of course, we install one of the pieces upside down, and of course, we discover this only when it’s too late to even begin to think about fixing it. Whatever material this monstrosity is made of – some NASA-grade invention that manages to be at the same time ridiculously heavy and flimsy – would not survive a second attempt at construction, and neither, I suspect, would our marriage. The Swedish probably have a word for the time you spend convincing yourself and your partner that the furniture is “supposed to be like that,” and another for the air of mutual resentment that permeates a room when two-college graduates realize that a sexless cartoon is a better builder than they are.

It takes an hour – or maybe two, or maybe twelve – before we finally, sweatily hoist the shelf against the wall. Justin is silent and fuming. I am ashamed of the barking, shrewish harpy I have become and how little time it took me to get there. In the Ikea showroom the Expedit looked like a chic, sleek place for books to preen themselves, like an airy Berlin gallery. In our living room, decoupled from its showroom lighting and cheerily artificial surroundings, it looks like what it is – a cheap, hulking mess that dominates the room with the charm of Cousin It. And because the house is so old and the floors are so warped, it does not even lie flush against the wall, but lurches forward at a 15-degree angle like a drunk about to vomit.

I look over at Justin, who is sweating and tired and covered in a fine particulate dust that probably contains asbestos. He works so hard. Today he spent what little time he has outside the office in a place he hates because his baby needed a bed and that’s where his wife wanted to buy one. That is love. I know all this and yet I am still furious at him, and that is marriage.

Why has Ikea caught on? We think it’s so great. We line up in droves for meatballs and Lack tables, but at the end of the day your marriage is in worse shape and there’s an ugly bookshelf in your living room. This is no way to live. Yet still we beat on, båts against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the great blue box off the freeway. 

A few weeks ago, my brother sent me a page from an old copy of The Oiler Times. The Times, as the New Yorker called us, was the Huntington Beach High School student newspaper. It was one of the greatest newspapers ever printed on 11 x 17 inch paper and hand-collated by juniors hellbent on getting into Berkeley. We were a publication unafraid to speak truth to power, if power was the girls’ varsity volleyball team and the truth was that they were going to have the best season ever! 

This particular edition (October 1995) contained an editorial on affirmative action, a review of The Brothers McMullen, a poem that includes the rhymes “taste her lips/teardrop drip” and “sinful night/envy’s searing bite,” and a review of the Patrick Read Johnson film Angus, written by yours truly. A good test of criticism is how well it holds up over time. Inspired by Grantland's Director's Cut feature, I decided to revisit my critique from the eyes of a woman now old enough to be that young writer's biological mother.

I was not a regular film critic for the Oiler Times. I was better known as the author of “Running on Empty,” a monthly humor column that – and I’m not bragging, I’m just being honest – was considered one of the most influential humor columns on the Huntington Beach Union High School District scene from 1996 to 1998. (Driver’s ed, huh? And parents! What’s up with them?) This was before the runaway success of that column, however, and I was still a hungry young scribe eager to prove myself. Coveted Times bylines were limited only to those who happened to hear the monthly staff meeting announced on the loudspeaker that morning and did not have anything better to do during lunch. Competition for assignments – a process by which the editor would read story topics aloud from a notebook, and the assembled journalists would raise their hands and volunteer to write that story – was fierce. I was obviously passed over to write the affirmative action commentary, but not so upset about it that I was moved to write the “tears for sale” poem. 

What do we learn from this review? In the opening paragraph, I level the charge that contemporary film did not accurately depict my peers and me, pointing to "Clueless" as Exhibit A. I know that I liked "Clueless" when I saw it, so I can say with confidence here that I had given the Failed Generation argument exactly zero thought before I sat down to write this review and found myself with nothing to say. Willingness to invent and/or sell out personal beliefs in order to move copy: check. Having established myself at the cultural vanguard, I go on to promote Angus as a refreshing antidote to the sugary pap that previous Oiler Times reviews lavished with praise. Lesser critics might have resorted to cliché, but I was not afraid to tell it the way it was – this movie was very real, and very cool.

It is not a coincidence that the movie I cheered was a movie about nerds. “Charlie Talbert’s Angus,” I write, “is a champion for the insecure and socially awkward,” a class of people whose needs and issues I was acutely aware of at the time. This is not something I wished my readers to know. (My readers were the same classmates who saw my daily wardrobe of flannel shirts and ill-fitting jean shorts, so I am not sure who I thought I was fooling, but still. A for effort.) Instead, I obscured my social status with dazzling moments of critical insight, like when I point out that Angus's obstacles and setbacks represent obstacles and setbacks. I rally their support - popular kids are a problem for "common teens" everywhere, right, fellow common teens? Right? Occasionally I tilt my hand, as in the admission that “one feels a sense of personal gratification” at the hero’s eventual vindication (“one” being a hypothetical Everyman, not any specific insecure socially awkward person who may or may not be reviewing this film). But readers, if I were unpopular, would I know that Green Day and Weezer were "cool bands"? No. I would not. 

This article also illustrates one of the lesser-known rules of great writing: If a word works once, it works better a second time. “Awesome” appears twice in this three-paragraph story. So does “cool.” So does “incredibly.” It is incredibly awesome and cool that film criticism was not part of the SAT verbal section, and that English was in fact my first language and not something I learned watching Star Gold.   

Some questions are lost to time. Why the grudging back-handed praise of Ariana Richards? Did I have a crush on scene-stealer Chris Owen? And was there really a time when it cost $3.75 to go to the movies? Did I attend high school during the Depression?