The Daily Grind

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photo by Andy Newman

I work in coffee shops. This is one of my favorites, called Smooch. So often do I come here, in fact, that I accidentally ended up in this photo, taken by a New York Times blogger. (That's me, in the foreground.) I even have a little ragtag community of "co-workers": My friend Amanda, a food writer named JJ Goode, a memoirist named Abby Sher, and all those people I recognize daily but never talk to. JJ, Amanda and I have a system whereby if one of us is talking too much and t