Category: General & Random

I review a handful of entertaining, affordable, and stylish small cars, perfect for negotiating hellishly crowded Parkways and Interstates on your way to equally hellish and crowded beaches and mountains where you”ll see everyone you know from your neighborhood in the City, over at Vanity Fair.

The latest Ferrari super-car–a replacement for the fast and ungainly Enzo–will appear some time before year’s end. We had a chance to view its crazy hybrid power-train firsthand at the Beijing Auto Show, and explicate it in terms anyone can understand, for Vanity Fair.

The chocolaty paradox of the Mercedes SLS AMG Roadster, plus four more deliciously brown convertibles for your cool summer. Review and slideshow at Vanity Fair.

“Brett Berk, car columnist at Vanity Fair, and author of ‘The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting’ said there’s a clear reason why people love to hate minivans: misogyny.”
From The Huffington Post, Minivan Sales are Up, but Don’t Call it a Comeback.

The Huffington Post picked up my article about Cranbrook, my gay hair, and Mitt Fucking Romney. Check it out.

Someone recently asked me to post the archive of my articles for the parenting site, Babble. So here they are.

1) Crying Uncle: Parenthood Ruined My Best Friends
2) The Gender Spectrum: Macho, Girly, and Beyond
3) Pinocchio Parenting: Why We Lie to Kids
4) The Good Divorce: Mediation
5) Where are the Queer Lit Classics for Kids?
6) In Praise of Junk Food!
7) Ad Literacy 101: Teaching Kids to Decode Commercials

Driving a Land Rover in a swamp, a Ferrari in the snow, a Porsche on a “simulated ice hill,” and a BMW against a freeway barricade. Instruction, marketing, or both? Welcome to the world of manufacturers’ consumer driving schools. My latest for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Like Mitt Romney, I attended Cranbrook, the elite Detroit-area private school. Unlike the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, I was not the rigidly straight son of a sitting Republican Governor, but a scholarship student, a political radical, and a burgeoning homosexual. But like John Lauber””the highly-publicized object of Mitt Romney”s teenage scorn, and the victim of violent assault led by Romney during the end of his high school years””I wore, as a proud symbol of my outsider status, a distinctly non-normative hairstyle. Or, rather, a constantly evolving series of outrĆ© dos that conformed to no known style, save my incompetence with the clippers and my desire to provoke.

Long and unkempt on top, cropped to the skull around the sides, occasionally with some or another slogan or symbol shaved into the back, my hair drew attention. The mother of a close friend described it as “appearing as though it wants to spin off your head.”¯ Fellow students described it as “gay,”¯ sometimes derisively, sometimes in packs, while pointing. A favorite English teacher pulled me aside one day and gave me some advice””impossible for any teenager, whose developmental goal is the externalization of that which can”t yet be internalized. “Brett,”¯ he said. “Don”t let your body be a pedestal for your haircut.”¯ (It should be noted that there was a barber on campus. I never visited, but I walked by his basement shop more often than could be ascribed to coincidence.)

Cranbrook nurtured me at a time when my home life was imploding. My parents had divorced just before I started high school there. My mother worked far more than full- time, and being only in her mid-30s, dated quite a bit as well. My father remarried a Born Again Christian woman who insisted he renounce his previous family, and he complied. Though I was a day student, and didn”t live in the dorms, my school, and my friends and teachers””the whole insular world of that beautiful, self-contained campus””became my home and my family. With its focus on both the arts and the liberal aspects of its liberal arts heritage””the school also hosts on its grounds a renowned graduate school of art””Cranbrook introduced me to the transformative power of sculpture, ceramics, and especially writing. (I never would have become a writer, or even thought it possible as a vocation, without Cranbrook.) It also helped guide me toward a lifelong connection to issues of social justice. It was with a Cranbrook teacher that I joined my first protest group, attended my first activist meetings.

I”m planning on attending my 25th high school reunion at Cranbrook this June””the first of any such official gathering I”ve intended to join. At that event, esteemed alumni will receive awards for their accomplishments; from what I”ve read, one of my classmates helped found Groupon, and will be delivering a keynote and receiving a plaque. Mitt Romney was granted this honor in 2005, at his 40th class reunion. I have not seen or read any statement from Cranbrook on the recent revelations regarding Mitt”s reprehensible behavior when he was a student there, but I trust that the institution that I love, and that so shaped my identity””and continues to do so for an incredibly diverse range of students””will have something wise to say.

(Click the photo above to expand. Note: that is not a shadow, that is my actual hair.)

We nab an Electric Ford Focus, squeeze out its juice, and make digital butterflies. (Also, we terrorize a Ford executive.) Read all about it at Vanity Fair.

Beijing is not a city, it is a virus, hellbent on voraciousness and replication. To wit: “Coughing Through the Sour Smell of Success” — my report on all the hideousness, opulence, and oddities at the Beijing Auto Show, for Yahoo! Autos.