“DANSON: I’ll tell you about the worst day of my life. Shelley and Rhea were carrying that week’s episode, and the guys were just, ‘Let’s play hooky.’ We’d never done anything wrong before. John had a boat, so we met at Marina del Rey at 8 a.m. We all called in sick, and Jimmy caught on and was so pissed. Woody and I were already stoned, and Woody said, ‘You want to try some mushrooms?’ I’d never had them, so I’m handed this bag and I took a fistful. On our way to Catalina, we hit the tail end of a hurricane, and even people who were sober were getting sick. Woody and I thought we were going to die for three hours. I sat next to George, and every sixty seconds or so he’d poke me and go, ‘Breathe.’ [gasp] And I’d come back to life. “
 — What’s that, you say? An oral history of one of the greatest television shows of all time? Prince is mentioned? See you in a few hours, Internet!

Apparently British Prime Minister David Cameron did not exactly cover himself with glory when he appeared on David Letterman’s show last night.

“Researchers say Americans consume 80 percent of the world’s supply of painkillers.”

“It limns me the wrong way,” protests Michiko Kakutani. “I’m totally gay for it,” confesses Lev Grossman. The English reviews are all over the map; the American reviews are generally less impressed. Just JK, Rowling! Don’t you worry about them none. Also you could buy the Times and fire Kakutani if you’re really mad.

Gwyneth Paltrow is 40 today. Yep, she is. If you are the kind of person who has absolutely no feelings about that one way or the other you deserve a much better world than the kind you currently live in.

It’s a good night for gays. Le1f is opening for/with Das Racist at Irving Plaza, the delightfully raunchy Headmaster magazine has an issue 4 launch party in Williamsburg, and Kurt Andersen and Jon Robin Baitz are chatting at UCB. (Gays love that Kurt Andersen.)

You like events? We have events.

When I decided to go with Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as this month’s pick, the first thing I did was call my dad, being generationally incapable of solving problems without parental input. My dad, last shanghaied into action for our Hammer of the Gods discussion, is a man of exquisite and discerning taste. Sometimes, though, he must be nudged along:

Nicole: Dad, you have to watch “Sherlock,” it’s a revelation.
Dad: I watched about ten minutes. It’s not believable that he’s that smart.
Nicole: YOU WATCHED ALL OF “BUFFY” TWICE, ASSHOLE, AND VAMPIRES AREN’T REAL. I’m sending you the DVDs. Call me back when you’ve seen them. But don’t watch the second season yet! Save it so I can watch your facial reactions to “The Reichenbach Fall”!

(Six days later.)

Dad: Yeah, it’s great. You were right.

… but he always gets there in the end. Anyway, old science fiction is kind of our thing; he stopped reading new science fiction when it became about computers instead of space, which I completely respect. You have to know when it’s time to pack up your bindle and start riding the rails to a new town, you know? We’re Dangerous Visions people. I had never read Heinlein, possibly because I had some vague memory of my dad saying it wasn’t great, so I was intrigued by the tenor of our discussion.

Nicole: Dad, tell me about Heinlein. You have… thirty seconds..
Dad: Shit. Shit. Okay. He was a bit of a fascist, though he was originally kind of a socialist, and SUCH an American (ed: my dad is Canadian and hates all of you, even the children), so although he’s similar to Andre Norton in terms of writing chiefly adolescent-oriented sci-fi in the 1950s and 1960s, he’s more planet-domination based. But it was good adolescent-oriented sci-fi, really. We didn’t have a lot of pornography at the time, so everyone had to seed their books with a lot of gratuitous sex scenes.
Nicole: I have an impression of Heinlein being for dudes. The kind of dudes who would go on to prefer Philip K. Dick when their taste improved? Would you agree?
Dad: No. I wouldn’t agree with that. Don’t quote me on that.

Hearing that Heinlein might be okay, I was obviously very excited, as someone who reliably enjoys popular things and SPACE. Space is wonderful, guys. It’s the future! We’re gonna trash this place, so let’s start working on an exit strategy. Heinlein knows what I’m talking about. Clearly, because the first sentence is: “Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.” Okay, guy, I’m listening. Go on.

Because so many Heinlein-isms (“grok,” etc.) have emerged into the Tumblrverse, it’s fun to watch individual sentences ping-pong between seeming incredibly current and adorably dated. “An all-male crew was vetoed as unhealthy and unstable. Four married couples were considered optimum…” Could you be more heteronormative, people-who-are-supposed-to-be-in-the-future? Not to mention a “Mad Men in Space” office sexual-harassment culture: “Well, if it ain’t ‘Dimples’! Hi, honey, what brings you here?” SCIENCE, motherfucker! And, naturally, when making a list of desired skill sets, they seem to require a cook, but not an IT person. (This was before you could buy astronaut ice cream.) But then, there are things we don’t even have NOW: “She put on the suit she had changed into back into her locker and put on a dress kept there for emergencies. It was demure, barely translucent, with bustle and bust pads so subdued that they merely re-created the effect she would have produced wearing nothing.” Um, paging Heinlein for Target? Where is our questing, visionary spirit?

Speaking of “Mad Men in Space,” Jill, our lady-heroine, is totally a Joan, so she effortlessly parries all of the ham-fisted “honey chiles” thrown her way. Heinlein appears to have loved some righteous women in his day, and it shows. Yes, not only did I unexpectedly enjoy the hell out of Strange in a Strange Land, it’s not nearly as reactionary as I had been led to believe. Maybe it prepared a bunch of sad, masturbating male teenagers to appreciate sassiness? Because, really, it’s kind of great. I must confess, I’m not quite resigned to the loss of years the locust has eaten. There’s such regret, isn’t there, in not reading things at the right time? We talked about this a little bit with Mists of Avalon. It’s best to spend your teenage years doing nothing but reading. What else is there to do? The boys are in a cloud of Axe, the men are bad for you, the women aren’t interested, and the girls, like you, are trying frenetically to figure it out. Best instead to read all the things, you’ll have decades to watch television after work. It doesn’t have to be good; it’s all the apprenticeship-work of gathering information that matters. I’m sorry, even, that I skipped Ayn Rand in high school, now. Maybe it would have been useful to me? This is a tangent, but I’m beginning to collect massive swaths of books for my kid, and you have to fight the urge to make them all “good.” The best experiences of being a kid, for me, involved going into the grown-up part of the library and reading an entire shelf (maritime law! sheep ranching!) from left to right, barely taking breaks to pee and eat the penny candy I afforded by stealing from my brother.

Science fiction, speculative fiction, whatever, is the perfect choice for that kind of behavior. Someone, and I LEGIT can’t remember who, once wrote that poking fun at science fiction, as a genre, is so silly, considering that mystery novels (which are also great!) are about death and murder and crime, while sci-fi is about reimagining the world and making it better and new and different. And, honestly, these are the books and pulps and magazines and comics that have done more than any other genre to begin the process of playing with race, and gender. No one is claiming that Heinlein is a social justice blogger, or anything like that, and it’s not a super-great book, but ANY KIND of science fiction, even of the Tits in Tight Silver Outfits variety, is implicitly saying that the world we currently live in is not the only way a world could be, that things could change. That’s really revolutionary, when you think about it. And, jeez, if you want to talk about “the story not the storyteller,” let’s think about Orson Scott Card. The man is a bag of dicks, when it comes to his personal politics, but Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus could actually make you a better person.

Now I’m starting to sound crazy, but please, if you’ve never tried, buy a copy of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. And Dangerous Visions. Get a little weird with it. Buy Women of Wonder: The Classic Years. I used to read it once a month, while scarfing bags of chocolate-covered almonds I wasn’t supposed to have access to, and now I am an interesting person.

I’m still not quite done with Stranger in a Strange Land, I need to get back to it. See you next month. WE’RE DOING ATLAS SHRUGGED. WHAT?!

PATRONIZING THINGS PEOPLE CALL JILL IN STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (THROUGH PAGE 206)

Dimples
Honey (four instances)
Honey chile
Honey lamb
Little one (four instances)
Sugar foot
Baby girl
Sweetheart
The babe
Little slut
Cherub
Good girl
Pretty foots (two instances)
Baby
Youngster
Dear
Child (three instances)
Girl (four instances)
Little girl
Wench

Bonus phrase: “A woman who can’t cook is a waste of skin.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Maybe there are vampires? There are definitely Geocities sites from the 1990s to this effect.

2 . No, really, though, arrrrre you watching “Sherlock”? I don’t know who the hell thought Kevin Costner out-acted Benedict Cumberbatch, but they should all be hung from meat hooks.

3. Speaking of Hammer of the Gods, in which Eric Clapton is referenced, I heartily endorse reading Clapton’s memoirs followed by Patti Boyd’s memoirs, followed by getting sober and reevaluating your life and marrying a younger woman. Who has thoughts about Eric/George/Patti?

4. I started a list called “People I Thought Were White Until I Saw Pictures of Them,” but realized it would only have Samuel Delany on it. Who would be on yours?

5. Starship Troopers: Great Movie, or the Greatest Movie?

6. What if Heinlein had founded a cult instead of L. Ron? What would it look like? Be specific.

7. Read Packing For Mars. This is not a question, it is a summons.

8. Ugh, I got so earnest. Sorry.

Previously: ‘Rebecca’: The Real Housewives Of Cornwall County

Nicole Cliffe is the books editor of The Hairpin and the proprietress of Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews.

★★★★ Not exhilarating, but punctuated with subtle loveliness whenever the day seemed about to vanish into its own background. Down on Grand Street, around midday, the sun made it impossible to read a smartphone screen, forcing the gadget back into a pocket and the eyes onto the storefronts and the passing people. On Lafayette, at the end of work, the breeze pulled a vein of grilling smell the length of a block behind a closed and departing food cart. And dusk over 72nd Street was a deep, calm, glass-bottle blue.

I have read this Scientific American article about how scientists have figured out how to build a clock that will continue telling time even after the universe no longer exists four times now, and a) Of course I’m not smart enough to really understand it. It has to do with creating an electric field that will trap charged ions in a four-dimensional crystal shape, and the ions’ natural “Coulomb repulsion” will start them rotating in a circle. (“Coulomb repulsion” is the thing where positively charged ions push away other positively charged ions and negatively charged ions push away other negatively charged ions, like with magnets.) The rotation in the crystal will be frictionless, and free of entropy, so it will never stop — even after the rest of the universe reaches the state of thermodynamic equilibrium (a.k.a. “heat death”) that we’re all waiting for, and dissolves into formless anti-matter. B) This has got to be the most useless gag gift I’ve ever heard of. A clock that tells time after the universe ceases to exist?! I mean, it’s like laser neutering for a pet rock, right?

by Trevor Butterworth

As part of its “Intoxication Nation” series, “a crazy land where Charlie Sheen is the mayor and Courtney Love is the sheriff” (according to actress Kristen Johnston, who’s a recovered alcoholic) ABC’s “20/20” warned viewers it would show them “what the kids are doing.”

This, according to the conventions of television, could not be good. The only question really, was the degree of plausible depravity. Vodka-soaked tampons? Check. Eyeball shots? Check. Gobbling booze-infused Gummi Bears because they want to live in crazy land all the time? Check. Once upon a time, Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” demanded the world entertain us; now, according to “20/20,” this generation of kids have found their entertainment in Katy Perry: they want to smell like minibars.

The horror. And it’s all the alcohol industry’s fault. As Koren Zailckas, the author of Smashed, a memoir of her blacked-out teen and college years, tells ABC: “I think the alcohol industry knows what the scientific community knows: the younger you are when you have your first drink, the more likely you are to become an alcoholic later on down the road.”

To which Chris Cuomo of “20/20” responded, “The Distilled Spirits Council of the United (DISCUS) States denies Zailckas accusations and told ‘20/20’ underage drinking is at historic lows but that’s the industry talking. The CDC says any decrease is insignificant.” This was accompanied by an on-air image of the DISCUS statement — but it passes by so fast you’d find it hard to see the line “according to U.S. Government data…”

So, intrepid citizen journalists, do you think there might be a gap between Katy Perry’s anthem for doomed American youth (“It’s a blacked-out blur/But I’m pretty sure it ruled”) and the statistics? Let’s Google!

I chose “Drinking historic decline,” which produced this as the top-ranked search item: “Cigarette and alcohol use at historic low among teens,” from the December 2011 National Institutes of Health News. How low? The lowest since the annual “Monitoring the Future” survey began polling teenagers in 1975. The survey was conducted by the University of Michigan under a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

But the joy of Googling doesn’t just end there. At number five in the search results is this gem from… ABC News: “Teen Smoking, Drinking Down; Marijuana Use Up.” For good measure, the network reported “binge drinking, defined as five or more drinks in a row within the two weeks the survey was conducted, was also down about a quarter since 1997.”

In case you weren’t sure what this meant, Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, explained to ABC News that “the decrease is very dramatic.”

As the Monitoring the Future survey for this year is not yet out, this is its most recent data.

But wait, it’s not the only government survey on alcohol abuse. Just this week, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) revealed its latest survey data. What they found:

So how could Chris Cuomo have construed DISCUS’s statement as industry spin rather than government data? Either ABC’s “20/20” didn’t even bother with the most basic due diligence supposedly required by “professional” journalists, namely, checking stuff out — or they fudged the data because it spoiled the “industry bad/anti-industry crusader good” narrative that is such a reliable source of original “moral panic” journalism. Either way, as Katy Perry puts it so piquantly in “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)”: “That was such an epic fail.”

Of course, this means whomever ABC spoke to at the Centers for Disease Control was either clueless or — given the CDC’s recent reluctance to admit its own data shows moderate drinking to be a “healthy behavior” — spinning.

There’s a serious point to this beyond fact checking. Is there any evidence that moral panic narratives actually induce kids to engage in less risky behavior? Or would stories that showed that most American kids are not in training to be John Belushi be more effective in reinforcing the idea that, actually, it’s not so cool to marinate your eyeballs with vodka? We’ll never know because as long as there’s one kid out there ready to do something stupid and dangerous, it would be too risky to suggest that most kids don’t do stupid and dangerous things.

Zailckas, for her part, is a former teen alcoholic, who wrote about her first sips of hard liquor (at 14 apparently) tasting “as hopeful and as heartbreaking as kissing a boy.” Her second memoir — Fury — is about the anger she felt after quitting drinking. Both have happy endings according to reviews, although, clearly, the first was only temporary.

Trevor Butterworth is a contributor to Newsweek, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and other publications.