
I'm an adviser to John McCain's campaign. 1 Siri calls me “Funk Deity.” 2 Aside from lessons in pole dancing—another fad workout sweeping Southern California—this may be the least macho exercise of all time. 3
I am not a cat person. 4 My mother was one for many years. 5 I am a professor of Shakespeare, among other subjects, at UCLA, and this has never happened to me. 6
I am a sucker for the man-befriends-nonhuman-creature genre of sitcoms. 7 I have no complaints about how much I make. 8
When the New America Foundation moves its offices in D.C., next week, Foreign Policy will become our tenants, but [...]

Food marketing is psychotic. It creeps. Smithsonian magazine ran a cover story with the headline How the Chicken Conquered the World. "Let us now praise chicken in all its extra-crispy glory! Chicken, the mascot of globalization, the universal symbol of middlebrow culinary aspiration!" That was last year. "Nothing is more worthless than an individual chicken," Joy Williams once observed. Not for Smithsonian. Obviously there was some war going on and the chickens kicked our ass.
It’s not just the birds. For a character in Francesco Pacifico’s novel The Story of my Purity, the place of psychosis is apricot pastries: "Industrial apricots had become humanity’s enemy number one, [...]

Ramps are fine. I will not bash any of the members of the House Of Allium, one of the most illustrious families of food. Tasty things can and have been done with them! But they are neither the only nor the best item that springtime has to offer. Eating seasonally does not necessarily require spending seven dollars on five tiny leafy scallions. This is not ramp season, my friends. This is a time of so much more. Here's a list of timely delicacies you should be gorging on, sans ramps.
SHAD and SHAD ROE Shad is a fish in the herring family, sometimes called a river herring. It migrates in [...]
CHAPTER SIX.
— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013
well, if she confesses and he kills her, great. the question is will she kill him first? BEAT
— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013
no, but i can–i can–yes, we can–BEAT (off, left) sherrill, can you–get gary maloney
— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013
END OF CHAPTER SIX.
— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013
So this is happening.

This morning, the NRA demanded that Congress place "armed police officers in every school," to create a "shield emergency response" around schools. "If we truly cherish our kids, more than our money, more than our celebrities, more than our sport stadiums, we must give them the greatest level of protection possible," NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre said, in a very long and strange speech. (A PDF of the prepared remarks is here.) The NRA's solution? "Properly trained armed good guys."
Gun bans "perpetuate the dangerous notion that one more gun ban—or one more law imposed on peaceful, lawful people—will protect us where 20,000 others have failed," LaPierre said. This is [...]
Jennifer Egan's "recent sci-fi excursions expose her not as a writer resigned to the waning importance of literature, but as a literary 'luddite' willing to take things to the next level, to begin a sabotage." —I'm not buying all of this but I like this as an idea.