Here’s a holiday gift-guide idea for all you editors scrambling to put together those annual monstrosities: Couples Botox! Now that men are embracing the ridiculousness, as reported in The Times, couples can bond over matching expressionless faces! One possible side effect: Without the ability to smile, frown or otherwise visually communicate emotion, Botox Lovers may experience an increased need to actually speak to one another. As Mickey Rourke demonstrates, the trade-off is totally worth it.

I am rechristening New York’s “Home Design” issue as “The Envy Issue.” Rich people’s abodes don’t usually give me such a boner. But this particular set of urban dwellings feature the most fabulous outdoor spaces, and it makes me feel much less smug about my couple-blocks proximity to Central and Riverside Parks. I mean, just think of the multitasking possibilities! You cook dinner with vegetables from your own garden (tended to by hired help, natch) while your kid tools around your at-home outside playground instead of tearing out the Tupperware drawer — and it’s not the ‘burbs, but New York City! Gawd, I so need to start buying lottery tickets.

The only home-schooled kids I ever knew were my cousins whose Jesus-
freak of a mother tried to burn the house down with all of them in it. Now she’s homeless but the boys turned out to be decent, if fragile and damaged, no thanks to their nogudnik criminal of a father (he’s the relation). But that’s not the issue with the New York City parents who home-school their children and are profiled in The Times’s Home section today. This emerging group, which seems well-educated and hip in the weird, self-consciously self-congratulatory manner increasingly common to urban centers, causes all kinds of online moral offense. But what strikes me is this: Why do these parents want to work so hard? School provides a free break during which time your child’s demands are another adult’s problem, and that is a beautiful thing.