I went to the press preview for the William Eggleston exhibit at the Corcoran gallery last week (gorgeous — read Krista’s fab review of it here) and tucked into the press materials was a short intro to this new exhibit, “Neighborhood Watch,” by Corcoran art professor Claudia Smigrod. Smigrod raised her children in Alexandria in the early eighties, and, being a photographer, spent her time shooting portraits of her children and their neighborhood friends. Twenty years later, she decided to revisit these pictures and photograph the children again — this time, grown up. The result is a stirring series of portraits that are both introspective and captivating. Many of the images ran in the Washington Post Magazine this past weekend, and all of them are fascinating. Each person speaks of what they believed in then, and where their head is now. It’s a simple but brilliant exercise, and I can’t help we’d all be a bit better off if someone took the time to stop, take our picture, and ask us where we came from.

The exhibit will be on view in the Corcoran Corridor, Corcoran Gallery of Art, from July 1 to Aug. 9. Take advantage of the free Saturdays and check it out.

I was interested to read this piece about Jodi Picoult in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend for a few reasons. The foremost: Damnit! I interviewed her years ago and now there’s an major feature about her and her upcoming feature film. The second, and actual reason, was it was interesting to read a profile of someone you’ve met fairly early on in their relative fame (when I interviewed her, back in 2002, she had not yet had a novel hit the New York Times best-seller list, and in fact, she chided Jonathan Franzen for rejecting the magic touch of the Oprah’s Book Club selection). Then of course, there was Gina Bellafante’s discussion of the nature of her novels and the genre of “children in peril” literature that’s become her shtick. I’m apt to agree with some of the commenters on Jezebel who point out that not all of her novels actually deal with children, and remember speaking with her about how she chose her subjects. At the time, she’d just come out with her latest novel, which dealt with the sexual abuse of a child by a priest. Surprisingly, given the fact that she was from New England, she actually began working on the book before the crisis in the church broke out.

Slate’s XX Factor interprets the piece as a statement about our ambivalence towards motherhood and marriage, which seems to be to be a bit of overexertion of an arguement. And a NYTimes mommy blogger talks about her own worries as parent, and how imagining the worst has become “almost a talisman now, a ritual that reminds me how fragile the moment, and how much to savor the now.”

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Ok, so it’s an easy target, but after an insanely long weekend home on Long Island, visiting wedding venues no less, it’s fabulously funny.

At long last, my article on Boulder, “This City is Better Than Yours” is out this month in Traveler (PDF to come, don’t worry). The online version went up today, complete with its very own slideshow, and this is my favorite photo. Excellent work done by Joanna Pinneo, who shot the piece.

Boulder is a fantastic town, and yes, it’s very easy to imagine packing your bags and living there (the girl who fact-checked this piece literally did just that as we closed the issue). At the risk of quoting myself, here’s the intro:

It’s been called the smartest city in America, the thinnest city in America, the best place for a runner or an überjock, and the top green and clean city in the United States. You have to wonder: Where is this perfect place? To find it, head about an hour’s drive outside Denver to Boulder, Colorado, a city of 100,000 people and a university town at the foot of the Rockies’ Front Range. “You’ve got 45,000 acres of open space and a hell of a natural park,” says Jim Philips, a naturalist for the city of Boulder, explaining its charms. But that’s not all: “It’s the air and the mountains—it’s everything.”

Really though, the moment I knew this city was kind of “perfectville” was at brunch one morning at the Dushanbe Teahouse. A 10-year-old sitting across from me was wearing a medal and had numbers written down his leg. After I finished my yummy meal, I congratulated the kid on his medal and asked what he’d done. “Swim, bike, run,” he said nonchalantly. Apparently it was not his first triathalon.

Update: See the full piece after the jump….

Photo: Joanna Pinneo

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Me: There is something so oddly comforting about American Cheese.
Tim: It tastes like childhood.