I did a double-take when I heard about this study on the morning news. Did we really need a controlled experiment to tell us that persons of your favorite gender look better after a few G&Ts? I think most of us are reminded of that rather pointedly whenever we rub the spot on our shoulders […]

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Apologies to Eve for taking close to a week to respond to her last post in our running exchange. I hope someone is archiving all this away so that I’m never tempted, even for a moment, to run for political office. I feel compelled to restate that I’m not actually in favor of infanticide as […]

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From the Village Voice‘s “Mad on the Street” page: What do you think of the mayor’s anti-smoking plan? I’d actually be all for it, which is odd since I am a smoker myself. I think it might make me smoke less. The increase in the cost of a pack of cigarettes hasn’t stopped me from […]

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As a New Yorker by temperament and, until recently, by residence as well, I was deeply skeptical of post-911 reports of the Death of Irony. “It’s not dead,” I felt certain, “it’s merely resting.” Yet reading the ever intensifying screeds of Village Voice editor Richard Goldstein against the gay right (or, as he’s also called […]

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Nella Garcia, a senior at Rice University, recently realized that in addition to her three majors in political science, English and Latin American studies, something else might help her achieve her career goals: her Hispanic identity. […] “There was a presentation on leveraging your ethnicity, and it will influence how I approach my future,” said […]

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I’m informed by my dad that today, August 13, is International Left-Handers Day. For centuries, my people — the left handed — were oppressed by Right Supremacists, and regarded as witches. In many languages, the word for left-handed (e.g. “sinister” in Latin) was associated with evil. And as recently as the Pleistocene Era, Ronald Reagan […]

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COLLECTION: GOAT HANDBOOK ORIGIN: UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE DATE INCLUDED: OCTOBER, 1993 — THE DOCUMENT LENGTH IS ABOUT 5 PRINTED PAGES NOT COUNTING IMAGES. A SMALL-SCALE AGRICULTURE ALTERNATIVE Cashmere Goats United States Department of Agriculture The world is beginning to give goats – nature’s best herbicide – more attention. Leafy spurge – poisonous to […]

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Thanks to Mike Daley for pointing me to the most self-aggrandizing mea culpa since Rousseau’s Confessions: hack screenwriter Joe Eszterhas writes in the New York Times that his “hands are bloody; so are Hollywood’s.” Their crime? Writing scripts in which characters smoke, and occasionally even look cool doing so. Eszterhas did so in such cinema […]

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Apparently, as part of the reorganization of American intelligence services we’ve been hearing so much about, counterterrorism will be handed over to the Keystone Cops. It appears that the controversial TIPS program is now forwarding its incoming calls to America’s Most Wanted. Yes, the Fox TV show. Really. At first, I was reminded of John […]

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