NYT Spoils a Little Girl's Christmas?

Okay, the odds of 2-year-old George Huffman finding out what her mom, Felicity Huffman, bought her for Christmas by reading the Sunday Styles section are admittedly pretty slim. Anyway, the more interesting element of the article, at least from a bookblog-centered standpoint, is that it's written by Hilary de Vries, author of the Hollywood chick-lit novel So 5 Minutes Ago. She's not the only fiction writer to show up in Styles this weekend, either: Brendan "Donorboy" Halpin contributes an essay to the recently launched "Modern Love" section about the slow, awkward path to dating after his wife's death. It is, quite frankly, the best essay that has run to date in a generally rather sorry column.

Meanwhile, over in the City section, Pete Hamill repurposes some material from his new book, Downtown, to pay tribute to the newspapers of New York's past and the start of his own career in journalism at a time when, he recalls, "New Yorkers still needed a newspaper to make the news feel real."