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The new Thursday Styles section flexes its macho muscles and takes a swim on the wild side, sending scribe Dana Vachon into the temples of the plutocrats, private clubs like the University and the Racquet, where grown men still engage in "one of the city's most curious, enduring rituals," swimming in the nude.

"You've got to watch out for a naked collision," warned my host, who detailed the worst injury sufferable in modern nude aquatics. "One guy wasn't looking when he was coming out of a lap and grabbed another guy. He felt something strange, but familiar." The disturbing possibility of such a man-on-man collision perhaps explains why those who look most disapprovingly on nude swimming are often the wives and girlfriends of its practitioners. When asked what his spouse thought of his morning dip, a private equity investor in his early 30's was brutally honest: "She just laughs and says that it's very, very, very gay."

Unlike Thursday Styles. —MG
 The Tao of Skinny-Dipping [New York Times]