The Strategist Haul: What the Editors Bought in May

I also finally got an armchair for my newish apartment. I came across this one on Way Day. All of the reviews looked good, the price (just over $200 during the sale) was manageable, and I liked the simple style, so I decided to go for it. I am thoroughly pleased with the purchase. It was easy to put together, it’s surprisingly comfortable for the price, and it looks, in my opinion, nicer than a $200 chair. It’s been a comfy place to consume ginger chew after ginger chew and read some Ellison.

I moved at the beginning of the month, so most of my spending money went toward furniture. Our best deal was a secondhand Floyd bed frame that my boyfriend found on Craigslist. It’s the birch version with white hardware, without the headboard, and we got it for $400, so a bit more than half of what it costs new. What surprised me the most was how easy the bed was to move — my new, primary criteria for all furniture coming into my third-floor walk-up apartment. The wood panels look and feel solid, but they’re light: I could even carry one upstairs all by myself. And after a few weeks of sleeping on it, I’m fairly impressed with how well it’s holding together (despite the ratchet strap-reliant construction) and how little the mattress slides around on the platform.

Without my roommate’s pour-over setup, I’ve gotten extremely lazy with my morning coffee routine (left to my own devices, I will drink cup after cup of plain Jane percolated coffee). But then I bought this Copper Cow Coffee sampler pack (SuChin Pak is also a fan). The coffee kits are designed to make it super-easy to have pour-over Vietnamese coffee every morning, without needing any equipment except a kettle. The niftiest part is that the coffee grounds come in a filtered bag with a set of wings on either side that you can nestle in your mug. It also includes single-serve sweetened condensed milk creamers (there’s a coconut-based vegan option, too). The company has guides on its site to make hot, iced, and cold-brew coffee, and they come in fun flavors like rose, lavender, and vanilla.

I was wandering through the MoMA Design Store last week and practically screamed when I found these adorable bean-shaped water bottle sponges. I bought them for a friend for her birthday, so I haven’t tried them yet, but the instructions are simple: Drop the little beans into your water bottle, add a drop of dish soap, and shake. They’re filled with aluminum and ceramic beads to give them some weight and scrubbing power, and they’re the perfect size for her narrow-mouth (and notoriously hard-to-clean) Nalgene.

I started playing the violin at 4 years old and stopped before I went to college. But recently, I decided to start playing again. Unlike practicing in my parents’ home as a kid, my apartment is much less welcoming when it comes to playing loud instruments at the end of the workday. To buffer the sound (and prevent my neighbors from hating me), I bought some mutes. These little rubber claws dampens sound by reducing how much the strings vibrate. It’s not as fun as playing without them, but it works for the time being, and I don’t have to stifle my strokes. The pack offers two different sizes, depending on how quietly I would like to play, and because I’m prone to losing things, it’s good to have spares.

My favorite linen shirt is back in stock at J.Crew and I couldn’t resist scooping it up in two new colors: the striped Washington Blue Multi (which has thin neon-colored stripes mixed in among the thicker blue and white ones) and the solid Sunrise Orange, which is not a color I’d normally wear, but one I want to start wearing. I like this shirt so much I bought the striped one at full price (!), but thankfully had the patience to wait for the orange one to go on sale, which, like clockwork, happened about a week after I made my first purchase.

As the former editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Paper, my desire to buy this T-shirt bordered on obligation. It has now been two years since I left, but finding street corners with the blue boxes that get stuffed with new issues every Friday remains a favorite pastime (much to my husband’s chagrin).

Children’s books now are all “Honor your feelings!” “It’s okay to be grumpy!” But when I was a kid, the literature seemed much more, um, Reagan-esque: Ernie fighting his instinct to fib; Rudolph realizing that self-pity only holds you back. Of course, I know that my 4-year-old is lucky that the genre has evolved, but also, quite frankly, he’s a boy who could stand to learn some explicit moral lessons. Which is why I decided to go ahead and revisit installments of the good old Berenstain Bears series, including the 1978 classic Too Much Birthday (because my son had a birthday party coming up) and the ’90s-era Green Eyed Monster (because he’s jealous of his younger brother). He seemed to absorb the messages — and in fact, he actually didn’t cry at his party.

One of my best friends recently became a member of Delta Sigma Theta Incorporated, and it’s customary for friends and family to give gifts once they join. Typically, we give paraphernalia with the sorority’s letters and/or elephants. Because I’m me, I wanted to get her something other than a T-shirt with her letters, so I opted for this Eames elephant, which is nice-looking and minimal and is the kind of décor piece she can display anywhere in the house. I bought hers in Black (which is currently sold out), but there are lots of other shades still in stock.

While my new racket was getting some overgrip applied, I wandered over to the shorts area. There were lots of colorful Baggies, but it was this funny ’90s-looking “Guard” pair that caught my eye. And the fit is everything I want: cinched and high-waisted, blousy through the hips, and generous in the pocket department. I’ll wear them for tennis (not the pool) and store extra balls in the little mesh liner.

In my house we try to limit the amount of sugar we buy so we’re not tempted to have an elaborate dessert every night of the week. But we always keep a little bit of chocolate in the freezer. This raw chocolate is my newest obsession. It’s rich, smooth, kind of fruity, and not overly sweet.