Justin Fenner

On the inside, I’m actually a crotchety old man who is enduringly resistant to change and all things new. Which is why when people started trying to tell me that fingerless gloves are now a thing, I really didn’t want to listen. I thought they were a special kind of accessory reserved only for motorcyclists who just hadn’t learned any better.

But that, of course, was before it started getting super, extra cold here in New York, and before I frequently found myself outside, tweeting and looking up subway instructions on my BlackBerry. To do these things and to keep my fingers from turning into icicles and cracking off, I was pulling my hands out of and rapidly pushing them back into my stodgy old brown wannabe suede Thinsulate gloves, which are, I must admit, overdue for replacement.

But maybe there’s a compromise somewhere in here. Urban Outfitters sells a pair of, uh, hand coverings that go from mittens to fingerless gloves in no time flat. They’re perfect for iPhone users who want to get in a quick game of Tetris before their fingers get too cold for their touch screens to recognize them as appendages connected to a warm-blooded being. They’re also perfect for people like me, who don’t want people to know that they own fingerless gloves.