Sunday Routine | Brian Darcy James

religion chung | summer school honolulu |

Mass, Egg Sandwich and Play Dates

Michelle Litvin for The New York Times

Brian d'Arcy James spends Sundays with his wife, Jennifer Prescott, and their daughter, Grace, 10.

By ROBIN FINN

Published: April 6, 2012

• Sign In to E-Mail
• Print
• Reprints

Brian d'Arcy James, who played the misanthropic ogre Shrek on Broadway, is now Frank Houston, the long-suffering husband of an emotionally volatile writer (played by Debra Messing) on NBC's new show "Smash." Twice a Tony nominee, and a star of the play "Next to Normal," Mr. James is delighted to have matinee-free weekends for the first time in years. Another plus: "Smash" is shot in the city, which he deems "a miracle." He spends Sundays with his wife, Jennifer Prescott, an actress and green design consultant, and their daughter, Grace, 10. They share an Upper West Side apartment with a cat named Jam; the family also has a country house in Sherman, Conn .

#sundayroutine : Readers can follow Brian d'Arcy James on Twitter on Sunday at @briandarcyjames .

Read more articles in this week's Metropolitan section .

Related

• More Articles in This Series

Connect with NYTMetro

Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for news and conversation.

Enlarge This Image

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Mr. James works out in Riverside Park with Kirk Benjamin, his trainer.

UP AND OFF TO CHURCH We wake up around 8, which usually leaves us just enough time to get dressed and get ourselves to 9:30 Mass at Holy Trinity on West 82nd Street. We don't dress fancy — it's not bow ties and bonnets — but we don't look slovenly.

SUSTENANCE I do love eggs and bacon and rye toast in the morning, so after church I might go to Lenny's and grab an egg sandwich; I stuff it in my mouth and head out the door and probably look like a dog that's just killed a bird.

COFFEE AND CHAT Grace has Sunday-school class from 10:30 to 11:30, so my wife and I will use that time to go to the Starbucks on the corner and just talk about the week coming up, logistics and stuff. It's no different than any marriage: during the week you're just so busy, but it's like on Sunday there's more room in my mind, there's time to have a normal husband-and-wife conversation. I get a Tall Blonde and Jen, who is very specific about what she eats and drinks, gets the Decaf Doppio Soy Macchiato with one pump of mocha; if I get the order wrong I hear about it instantly.

PLAY DATES, MAYBE Our two options after Grace gets out of her class depend on her social calendar. She likes having play dates, so the connective tissue may be us walking her to somebody's house, or else if she doesn't have a play date we try to do something interesting. I love going to movies and I crave especially going with my daughter, since there are so many kid-friendly movies out now, like "Hugo." We also go to Make Meaning , this arts-and-crafts place where you can make things, like doing your own ceramics.

GYM TIME If Grace has a play date, I'll go to the gym, the New York Sports Club . I have this great trainer, Kirk Benjamin. When the weather gets better, I go to Central Park and run the six-mile loop, but while it's iffy, I keep the flame burning by doing an hour of cardio and core stuff at the gym. And about 25 percent of the time, if it's nice out, Kirk and I will go to the park and supplement the inside stuff by training out there.

COOK OR GO OUT If Jennifer and I have gone out a lot during the week, we stay home and she cooks dinner. However, if we've been home or they've been home and I've been off shooting, then we'll go out. If we go to Island Burger and Shakes , I get the chicken sandwich. If we're in the mood for sushi, and being a boy from Michigan I'm impressed that my 10-year-old daughter is a fan of sushi, we like Haru . I don't get anything too exotic. And there's a new place near us, Spring Natural Kitchen ; they have a great lamb burger and Grace's favorite, taco salad.

BOOK AND TV Grace does her homework; she's reading "The Hunger Games," so I will read that, too. She goes to bed at 8:30, and after that, I love watching TV. This winter, Sundays were all about football, and we watched "Downton Abbey," and we always see "The Good Wife." I might sneak out for a walk so I can buy a piece of candy for dessert. If I'm shooting on Monday, I go over my lines because the clock is ticking. But I'm a night owl. Bedtime is midnight. Or 12:30.

Theo www.nytimes.com

Bits

kenh giai tri | summer school honolulu |

Taking a Chance on Love, and Algorithms

By JENNA WORTHAM

Published: April 7, 2012

• Sign In to E-Mail
• Print
• Reprints

THE invitation from Yoke.me , a new online dating start-up, seemed innocuous enough. It suggested that I meet some of the single pals of one of my friends.

Enlarge This Image

Lloyd Miller

Yoke.me pulled in data from Facebook — my city, for example, and what movies I prefer — then generated matches with people from my extended social circle, based on common interests, like a shared love of Rihanna's music or "Game of Thrones."

It is ingenious, in a way. How many single people have trolled through a friend's photo album on Facebook, spotted someone cute and then asked for intel about his or her availability? Poring through a trove of friends of friends can seem better than gauging whether the creep factor of a random person is low enough to warrant an in-person meeting.

Yet the idea was still troubling. My friends and I started a long e-mail thread about it, riffing that despite its elegant design, it seemed awkward and presumptuous. Not all Facebook "friends" are actually friends, and it's not entirely clear that the bands and shows we've "liked" on Facebook can really be used to say anything meaningful about us.

"I've found my newest nightmare," one friend said. "One match was a girl because we share a birthday," said another. "One match was a guy because we both like Gilt," a shopping site. "Is this for finding friends, dates or enemies?"

To be fair, the problem doesn't seem to be confined to Yoke.me . It may be part of online dating itself. Sites and apps like OKCupid , eHarmony , Skout , Plenty of Fish and Match.com have attracted loyal followings. But in a world where we can pay someone for lunch by tapping two phones together and stream live television over a tablet computer, the de facto model of browsing through static profiles on a Web site or in a mobile app can feel comically outdated.

It may not be a problem that software can solve on its own, said Eli Finkel, a professor of social psychology at Northwestern University. "Technology is not the way to figure out who is compatible and will never be," he said. "At the end of the day, the human algorithm — neural tissue in our cranium called a brain — has evolved over a long period of time to size up people efficiently. On a blind date, a person arrives and in that instant I can say I'm glad I did this or regret it."

Professor Finkel, along with several other researchers, published a study this year raising doubts about the idea that a personality test or algorithm of the kind popularized on eHarmony, can help you meet a potential mate.

Sites that say algorithms can help you find your soul mate "are probably spitting in the wind," said Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and a co-author of the algorithm paper, who has written upwards of 120 papers on online dating.

EHarmony counters that the algorithms it uses do work, citing research it conducted investigating the satisfaction of couples who met through the site, and their divorce rate.

The system that eHarmony has built is "based on years of empirical and clinical research on married couples," said Becky Teraoka, an eHarmony spokeswoman. They include "aspects of personality, values and interest, and how pairs match on them, that are most predictive of relationship satisfaction."

While Professors Finkel and Reis question the value of algorithms, they do say that online dating is useful because it can broaden the pool of people you come across on a regular basis.

"In everyday life you don't encounter people with signs on their head that say, 'I'm single and looking,' " Professor Reis said. On sites you can find "dozens of people that you might want to meet."

The trick is to weed out the weirdos and arrange a face-to-face meeting as quickly as possible — which, in a sense, is what Yoke.me is trying to do, as are similar services like theComplete.me and Coffee Meets Bagel .

Other sites are trying to move past the algorithm. A start-up called myMatchmaker uses in-the-flesh people as intermediaries. Some, like Nerve.com, and How About We , aim to streamline the process and encourage interactions around more than a profile.

But Kevin Slavin, a game developer who studies algorithms, says those sites are already starting from a flawed base.

The digital personas we cultivate on Facebook are often not very indicative of who we are, he said. "A first date is the most tangible instance of you being the best possible version of yourself, the version you think will be the most attractive to someone else," he said. "It is impossible for that to be the same person on Facebook."

Rob Fishman, who helmed the development of Yoke.me , says he views the service as an icebreaker, not as a crystal ball capable of divining whether or not someone is your one true love. "We aren't saying you will want to spend your life together; you don't even know each other yet," he said. "You like the same band, talk amongst yourselves."

Eventually, Mr. Fishman said, the service will be sophisticated enough to incorporate real-time data funneled through Facebook about songs people are listening to and articles they are reading and to make matches based on that — perhaps a more realistic way to connect two people through a social network.

ALL of this may simply mean that online dating is at an early stage. In other realms, we're already moving toward a future when the most dazzling and successful technologies are not visible and work almost by magic.

Consider Kinect from Microsoft. You can play a dance game by moving your whole body, without the need to hold a physical controller. Or try Square's latest mobile application, Pay With Square . The app's software will show a cashier a photo of a customer to verify payment information. Shoppers never even have to remove their phones from their pockets — only say their names and show their faces.

Then there is the Paper drawing app for the iPad . Its "rewind" feature lets users twist two fingers in a counterclockwise motion to erase their last few brushstrokes.

And, of course, there is Siri, the iPhone service that can understand spoken commands, perform Web searches and write and send text messages. Although Siri isn't perfect, it feels like a taste of the future.

That shift is leaving online dating in the dust. It feels clunkier than it should — like a poorly designed tablet or a Web service that keeps crashing.

It's a technology quandary fit for modern times, and one that doesn't have a clear solution in sight — yet. No one wants to see Cupid interfering with his or her love life; we just want the arrow to hit squarely on its mark. And, maybe someday, it will.

Theo www.nytimes.com