I’m as big a fan of Werner Herzog as the next guy, but isn’t the “Werner Herzog reads = FUNNY” equation starting to get a little tired? Anyway, here ya go: “Legendary film director Werner Herzog has agreed to narrate an audio version of the surprise hit Go the Fuck to Sleep, a comic bedtime book for parents that has become an unlikely bestseller.”

Nothing says summer like the arrival of fresh-faced children in our office, bearing lattes in each hand. Thanks, interns! Please welcome this season’s Youngs, in alphabetical order….

Nate Hopper, Reporter, Politics

Nate Hopper is a 20-year-old magazine journalism and economics dual-major at Syracuse University. He’s reported in South Africa, written for a bunch of campus publications, and will be the features editor of one in his upcoming senior year. In the meantime, he’ll be reading and writing about interesting things while simultaneously honing his afternoon nap and drinking-water connoisseurship. Sometimes he writes a contemporary funk and soul music blog.

Olivia LaVecchia, Reporter, Interviews

Olivia LaVecchia has lived in five different cities this year, and now she’s living in Brooklyn for the summer. She studies journalism and poetry at Northwestern, and just finished interning at Texas Monthly, where she wrote about giant strawberry shortcakes and interviewed the pyromaniac kid in Super 8.

Emily Morris, Reporter, Literary Culture

Emily Morris is a senior English major at Smith College. She spent the last year in Cordoba, Spain, where an English major makes no sense. She has interned at an art museum and a state-funded film production company. One time she sold Mary Kay by accident.

Myles Tanzer, Reporter, New York City

Myles Tanzer loves the internet. He interned for Runnin’ Scared at The Village Voice for two semesters. He’s also the entertainment editor of NYU Local. Myles also enjoys cooking his way through the Momofuku Cookbook and studying the discography of Common. He recently moved into a tiny apartment in the East Village. A gin and tonic is his summer drink as well as his winter, spring and fall drink.

“Call them the mommyrexics — a breed of new moms who are pressuring themselves to bounce back to fighting weight days after they’ve left the hospital. Squeezing into maternity Spanx after having a baby isn’t good enough. These moms want to starve and jog themselves skinny if it kills them.”

“Genetic engineers are deliberately breeding transgender goats to see if their milk is similar to that produced by humans. The goats being created are effectively a female trapped in a male’s body, complete with the full male anatomy. The company behind them wants to see if their milk contains the same proteins as human breast milk — with a view to one day possibly selling it in stores.”
 — Also, they’re called “goys.” What a world.

Did you know today was a holiday? It is. It is Flag Day, when we’re all supposed to fly the American flag somewhere, in commemoration of the Second Continental Congress’s June 14th, 1777 adoption of the design commonly, but, many believe, mistakenly, attributed to Philadelphian seamstress Betsy Ross. The best thing about this holiday, to me, is that it reminds me of my favorite song by the Housemartins. (That’s former Housemartins singer Paul Heaton, above, performing it last year.) The worst thing about it is pretty much everything else. I don’t like flags.

I don’t like flags mostly for the same reason that I don’t like any of the other trappings of nationalism. The Marxist hippie pipe-dream thing of imagining that the world would be a better place without countries. No lines drawn on maps to divide people. Nothing to kill or die for and all that. No religion, too.

I understand, though, that like all pipe-dreams, a world without countries is probably unrealistic. Or in fact, were it possible, undesirable. I’m not an anarchist, and the notion of a single-body world government is of course fraught with its own problems — those both logistical and of the sci-fi dystopia, Illuminatus, United Nations’ blue-helmeted variety. (I’m sure THE MACHINES will handle at least the logistics part well.) So, I guess, countries might be our best bet. All my wishes are only lies.

But still, flags do seem to embody and encourage all the worst aspects of nationalism. Something to rally around and salute, to get mad about if, God forbid, this piece of cloth material touches the ground. Bursts of signifying color to wave in big crowds while we shout the name of our country, to let everybody else know: We are us, you are not. We choose us.

I also happen to think our flag, the American one, is ugly. Blocky and overly primary colored. Off-puttingly un-semetrical, and yet still rigid and staid. I know this particular analysis is specious. It’s hard to separate the aesthetics of an image so loaded with symbolism and meaning, and we get so much of the latter fed to us for our entire lives. But, I really don’t much like it. If we really need to have to have a flag — and, again, I don’t think we do. How great would it be if a new country, Southern Sudan, say, just decided, “Nope, no thanks. No flag for us. We think saluting an inanimate object is stupid.” But if we really need to have a flag, wouldn’t it be nicer if we could have one like Mauritania, or Palua? Or Barbados?

Now that’s a good-looking flag. It’s like the old Seattle Mariners caps. I miss them.

But again, a pipe-dream. Here in the U.S.A., we’re stuck with the flag we’ve got. Old glory. And everybody’s always going to expect us not to draw on it or step on it or light it on fire. Until THE MACHINES reassign us one that’s just a bar code. That will better, sort of.

Today is also World Blood Donor Day. Which is a holiday I can more easily get behind. Though don’t try the thing where you give blood and then go drinking right after to catch a cheaper buzz. A friend of mine in college did that once and fell down a flight of stairs and split open his chin. He had to go to the hospital for stitches. He still has the scar.

“For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. Rationality allowed a solitary thinker to blaze a path to philosophical, moral and scientific enlightenment. Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments.”

Sad news yesterday from Florida, where saxophonist Clarence Clemons, the big man who made all the little pretties raise their hands when he joined the E-Street Band in 1972, was left partially paralyzed after suffering a stroke at his home. He’s had two brain surgeries, but is reportedly now in stable condition. Clemons, 69, plays on Lady Gaga’s new album, on a song called “The Edge of Glory,” and performed it with her on American Idol last month.

Here’s wishing him a full recovery.

In the vast backseat, Chris was even more flirtatious than before, touching my arm and my knee. At this point, which was a… number of drinks in, it was easy to forget that it really was an interview, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind that something might happen (and that we’d go to the Oscars and get married and have babies forever until we died?). But there was always the question of how much of it was truly Chris Evans, and whom I should pretend to be in response.

— Oh my! To say that “hijinks ensue” with The Hairpin editor Edith Zimmerman working at profiling mega-Bostoney Captain America Chris Evans in GQ is a wild, wild, serious understatement

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Album By Metal Band Or Female Singer/Songwriter?

by Brittany Shoot

1. Wearing a Martyr’s Crown

2. Hymns for the Exiled

3. Resurrection Macabre

4. Prima Donna

5. Extraordinary Machine

6. Lullabies for the Dormant Mind

7. Middle Cyclone

8. Puddle Dive

9. Shallow Life

10. The Harvest Floor

11. Let It Rain

12. Rapture

13. Goodbye Alice in Wonderland

14. The Bleeding

15. Nightfall

Answers: 1. metal (Nightrage); 2. singer/songwriter (Anaïs Mitchell); 3. metal (Pestilence); 4. singer/songwriter (Tami Chynn); 5. singer/songwriter (Fiona Apple); 6. metal (The Agonist); 7. singer/songwriter (Neko Case); 8. singer/songwriter (Ani DiFranco); 9. metal (Lacuna Coil); 10. metal (Cattle Decapitation); 11. singer/songwriter (Tracy Chapman); 12. metal (Impaled Nazarene); 13. singer/songwriter (Jewel); 14. metal (Cannibal Corpse); 15. metal (Candlemass)

Brittany Shoot is a writer based in Boston and Copenhagen. She occasionally blogs about life in Denmark.

“In a newly published study, three University of Oklahoma researchers report there is a higher rate of accidental deaths among whites (but not nonwhites) in the American South and West — regions where a ‘culture of honor’ makes backing down from a challenge problematic for many males. Writing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, they conclude men living in these regions ‘might be more prone to engage in risky behaviors that sometimes lead to death,’ because this willingness ‘signifies that one possesses the “manly” attributes of strength and courage.’”