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Once a month my edition of the Times comes with San Francisco Arts Monthly, which you would think as a lover of the arts living in the San Francisco Bay area I would find useful, but most of the time the stuff in it is too hifalutin to be worth driving all the way to the city for. (I remember when I moved here I swore I would never use "the city" to mean San Francisco, because to me The City was always New York. Another pretension gone by the wayside.) But this month there's an an interview with Merle Kessler about his new Ian Shoales show. Hooray! Unfortunately their web site makes it hard to link to.

In Sunday Styles, an article about the author's experiences wearing a skirt in Brooklyn. My favorite part is the phone conversation with his wife.

The Travel section goes to Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco. Hey, I've been there!

In Money & Business, an interesting article questioning the practicality of employer-paid health insurance offers this historical note:

There is no good reason for any of this, aside from historical accident. During World War II, federal wage controls prevented employers from wooing workers with higher pay, so companies started offering health insurance as a way around the law. Of course, this form of nonmonetary compensation is still pay. When the war ended, the practice stuck.

And in the Book Review, Laura Miller writes about the sameness of most contemporary short stories.