New York Times, Weddings

Legal Eagle Wedding Watch 6.7: Matched

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Another week, another NYT Vows column comparing the bride to a giant coniferous tree (“The bride stood stately and erect, echoing the Redwoods that surrounded them . . . “). Seriously, could they maybe assign Vows once a month to a real writer, just to make it a little less chirpy and insipid? What about Maureen Dowd? What about Paul Krugman?
Here are this week’s finalists, including the tree-like bride:

1. Alizah Diamond and Itai Maytal
2. Stefanie Schneider and David Alpert
3. Anya Emerson and Jonah Staw

After the jump, our non-chirpy analysis of these couples.



1. Alizah Diamond and Itai Maytal
(Buy them some napkin rings.)
The Case:
– Solid, though not stratospheric, credentials for this two-JD New York couple. The bride graduated from Johns Hopkins and has a law degree from Georgetown; she’s an associate at Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis.
– The groom graduated from Yale and has a master’s in journalism from Columbia and a JD from Cardozo. He works in both journalism and law as the NYT’s First Amendment fellow, a job that involves defending libel suits brought against the paper and litigating freedom-of-information issues.
The Case Against:
– Their website is heavy on details that, personally, we’d have kept under wraps: There’s the online angle (Itai was “a veteran j-dater”), and the hints that their moms basically dragged them to the huppah (“Ahuva (Itai’s mom) proposed to Alizah almost immediately”). It’s also poorly punctuated. Maybe their moms were in charge of the website, too.
– We’d thought that Columbia’s journalism school was one of the most prestigious in the country, but apparently the same credentials that merit admittance there will also get you a JD from . . . Cardozo.

2. Stefanie Schneider and David Alpert
(Buy them a stock pot.)
The Case:
– This bride gets points for having a JD from Stanford, a credential we don’t see often enough in the NYT (she also graduated summa from Duke). Stefanie is an associate at Wilmer.
– David, a Harvard graduate, is the founder and editor of Greater Greater Washington, an interesting and valuable blog about making life better for people in DC’s “walkable cities and neighborhoods” (but not, apparently, for lame-o, unenlightened suburbanites).
The Case Against:
– This post hints that David is a Google millionaire. Which, we assume, is how he can afford to live in Dupont Circle and blog all day about how other people should bike to work.

3. Anya Emerson and Jonah Staw

The Case:
– This offbeat couple has the Vows column and packs it with breezy quirkiness, or at least what passes for that in the NYT wedding pages. He sold his toys in a garage sale at age 5 (how quirky and entrepreneurial!); they took a 10-day trip to Peru (how quirky and adventuresome!); she proposed to him (how quirky and brazen!).
– Scattered amongst all the in-your-face quirkiness are a few tidbits about their backgrounds. Anya graduated from Stanford and has a master’s from Oxford and a JD from Columbia; she works for the nonprofit New York Legal Assistance Group. Jonah was magna at Brown (Brown = quirky!) and runs his own business.
The Case Against:
– Like LEWW, you probably spend a great deal of time scouring the internet for that perfect pair of mismatched socks. So many occasions demand non-matching footwear, and yet it’s not as if you can just reach into your sock drawer, pull out a sock, and un-match it with another sock from your dryer or whatever. Problem solved: Jonah’s website, Little Miss Matched, sells unmatched socks with names like “zany” and “kooky.” They come in “pairs” of three. And even though they don’t match, they sorta do. Got it? Okay.
– Their registry is password-protected. We can see the logic of doing this if you’re a clergyman registering for $1,600 plates and you have a healthy sense of shame. But what could one possibly register for at freaking Williams-Sonoma that would necessitate such iron-fisted privacy? Perhaps it’s just another bourgeois registry and not, you know, quirky.
The Verdict:
We don’t see a clear winner this week, so we’re opening it up to a reader poll:

Thanks for voting. The poll will close on Tuesday at noon.

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