Maira Kalman Day

The first Wednesday of every month is Maira Kalman Day. That's when the writer and illustrator Maira Kalman publishes her blog, The Principles of Uncertainty, on the New York Times website.

Kalman has written and illustrated a number of children's books, Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style," and produced some very famous New Yorker covers and back pages, including "Newyorkistan," and "Ask Your Doctor," a made-up list of new drugs that I remember reading aloud to my adorable mildly hypochondriac parents, laughing until we could barely breathe. She is also a professor of desgin at the School of the Visual Arts in New York.

Her blog is out of this world. Or rather, very much in this world, in an ethereal, tragicomic way. She makes me miss New York and Paris. She makes New York and Paris more beautiful even than they are.

And she has fabulous hats.

We should all be so lucky.