Cheat Sheet

Over at Slate, John Swansburg pens a love note to the birthday party—bumper bowling for kids, a nice game of Taboo at home for grown-ups—as he takes down its 20-something iteration, the birthday dinner. “In the moment between earning your college degree and signing your first mortgage, the birthday party transmogrifies into something else. It becomes the birthday dinner,” he writes. A few years out of college, meeting up at a dive bar for a few drinks becomes “a shade déclassé,” so everyone compromises—by inviting friends out to dinner at a restaurant. “Seems like a nice idea, the birthday dinner,” he writes. “It is not. It is a tedious, wretched affair. It is also an extravagantly expensive one. In these wintry economic times, we need to scale back. I hereby propose that the birthday dinner go the way of the $4 cup of coffee, the liar’s mortgage, and the midsize banking institution.”