Petri Dishes
Mens Sana in Something
Recently, during a study at the business school, someone posed me a relatively simple question about the number of elves required to make X widgets in four hours if one elf could make Z widgets in two hours. I was instantly bewildered. “I think this is a real commentary on elf working conditions,” I wrote next to the question, before bursting into tears and muttering something about post-feminism.
Into the Woods
Personal sins shouldn’t require press releases? Problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions?
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
Statistically speaking, only about 19.2 million Americans have crippling fears of things, and our fears tend to be illogical—airplanes (1 out of 20,000 fatality rate) rather than cars (1 in 100); dentists rather than the apparently friendly people who tend to abduct our children.
What Would Oscar Do?
And he would deserve it. (Nowadays, in the midst of bans on sexiling and Nobel Peace Prize furors, it’s easy to forget the truly important things, like calling your parents or stopping to wish happy birthday to the “first modern man.”) Wilde is an invaluable acquaintance. Often, in situations where I am required to appear witty, I simply steal large chunks from his works and attempt to pass them off as my own with minor modifications. I’m not the first to do this—Dorothy Parker noted, “If, with the literate, I am/Impelled to try an epigram/I never seek to take the credit/We all assume that Oscar said it.” But I know he would approve. When a woman told him that a passage from one of his plays reminded her of a drama she had read before, he nodded. “Taken bodily from it,” he admitted. “Why not? No one reads anymore.”
Off the Books
Someone in the business recently estimated that there are only 80,000 reliable buyers of serious fiction left in North America. And that was before we lost Michael Jackson. Every year, someone comes out with a study explaining that boys don’t read because, in books, the proportion of car chases to women talking about their feelings tends to be somewhat tilted in favor of the latter. But what’s the excuse for us women?
