by Christian Vachon

Tonight, protesters have surrounded the parliament building in downtown Cairo. There have been two deaths of protestors in Suez; one policeman has died in Cairo, hit by a rock. The protestors in Tahrir Square have been tear-gassed, and Twitter has been blocked within the borders of Egypt.

But this morning, as the sun burned a smoky haze off the face of this city, the streets were open and clear as I rode downtown at 8 a.m.

There had been tweets that protests would be staged in Tahrir Square and in the downtown neighborhood of Mohandeseen. These tweets were received by Egyptian authorities monitoring the hashtag #jan25, and they deployed a massive security presence to deter any demonstrations. Officers stood in groups of 6 to 8, on nearly every street corner. They blockaded the entrance to the parliament building. The teams stood quietly with folded arms watching the empty streets as the sun rose over the Nile.

Around the block, I exited my taxi and sat down at a nearby hotel for coffee, waiting as the hours passed. I saw six trucks of police pass on the highway, heading south to Mohandeseen. I jumped into a taxi and followed them.

But here as well, only a small army of police guarded the downtown commercial district. Not a demonstrator was in sight, and sensing this protest had ended before it would begin, I went home.

When I arrived, the Twitter hash #jan25 lit up. Someone said that earlier tweets had been deliberately planted as decoys to mislead authorities. Now, in dozens of real locations throughout the city, protesters had begun to mobilize.

I ran out the door and took the subway back to Tahrir Square.

When I arrived, the protest had begun. In the street a group of close to 200 Egyptians, mostly men, were standing, chanting and waving flags. Blocking both sides of the street were lines of police in riot gear. Immediately surrounding them, outnumbering the protesters, were older Egyptian men and young women.

They were joined by other young Egyptians and nearly all of them were taking photographs. Watching the bystanders there was a feeling that they almost did not know how to act or what to do. This was something they had never seen in their lives. So they took pictures.

The group pushed at one of the police lines. The officers yielded to them, opening their line of shields in the middle, letting the group pass to avoid conflict. The group marched on through the street, chanting. As they marched, gradually, the voyeurs, seeing that the police were not attacking, joined their countrymen.

In the three blocks they walked, the crowd grew. Many of the photographers became protesters. It seemed that their size had almost doubled by the time the group turned into Tahrir Square. They spilled out into the center of the plaza. There they flooded out into a mass of thousands of other protesters, who had marched to the same point from different locations throughout the city.

At this juncture, the tenor of the afternoon shifted.

Egyptian police blocked both sides of Tahrir Square, pressing the protesters. This began a dangerous tug of war between Egyptians and authorities. Demonstrators began to push into the wall of police shields. In response, police beat them back into position with batons. During these exchanges I saw one police officer pulled into the crowd, tossed onto the ground and beaten before other officers extracted and carried him behind police lines. At one point some protesters picked up rocks and threw them at the police, but they were chastised by others who yelled to them, “stop, stop we must keep it peaceful.”

As the tension escalated the crowd grew loud and impassioned. The chants continued as they yelled, “my country, my country.”

On the south end of the square, a military tank rolled into the crowd. At the top of the tank an officer manned a fire hose that hammered down onto the protesters. But no one moved.

The fire tank had not advanced more than 30 yards before a young Egyptian sprinted up the front of the vehicle and scaled up the side. He proceeded to climb up to the top of the tank, inciting ovations from the crowd. When he reached the top of the tank, the officer manning the hose dropped the nozzle and jumped on the back of the protester. The two men toppled off the vehicle and onto the ground, where the man was taken away by other officers.

The moment they fell to the ground, the front 200 protesters dropped to their knees in unison and began to pray while the rest of the crowd looked into the faces of Egyptians staring at the scene from high above in their apartment windows. “Who will be the next hero?” they chanted as they looked up. Then they burst into a new chant: “Come join us, come join us!”

I tried to get out the protest. I started towards the front of the pack, hoping to find a side alley to duck into, but had not gotten more than 20 yards forward before being warned by an Egyptian teenager: “Don’t go to the front — they’re taking pictures to ID people.”

The fight for territory between authorities and protesters moved back and forth. At the north end of the square, police moved their lines back off to the sidewalk and stood beside the Egyptian Museum — because yet another wave of hundreds of protesters, mostly men, was charging towards them chanting, “Allah help us.” Seeing the retreating police, I started down the street hoping to get out to the highway. As I fled an Egyptian man in his mid 40s stopped me.

“Not there,” he said, “more protesters are coming, this way.” He pointed to a side alleyway.

“Where are they coming from?” I asked.

“Everywhere,” he said, “they are coming in waves, every ten minutes from all over the city.”

“Why?”

“They don’t like the government. No food. No drink for people. Many people poor. This is just beginning. Next group comes out in a half hour.”

“It is planned this way?”

“Yes,” he said.

I said goodbye and ran down the alley. I continued down the street for a few blocks until I could hail a taxi home. We crossed a bridge over the Nile as the sun went down. In the lane beside us, in the place of on coming traffic were hundreds of Egyptians, wrapped in flags, chanting aloud, all on their way to Tahrir Square.

Update: See photos from the protest here.

Previously: Hushed and Growing Dissent in Cairo: “It Is Going to Happen Here”

Gordon Reynolds is the pseudonym of a teacher in Cairo. Follow him on Twitter here.

I very much enjoyed Bethlehem Shoals referring to Gwyneth Paltrow as “Goop” in the second sentence of his piece about Country Strong and Townes Van Zandt on Friday. I would like it if the nickname stuck. For a few reasons, I guess, but mostly because Goop is also the name of a character on my six-year-old kid’s favorite television show, “Ben 10 Alien Force.”

Are you up on “Ben 10”? It’s a pretty good show for the type of show that six-year-old boys like. The hero, Ben Tennyson, has a special watch-like gizmo called The Omnitrix which allows him transform into various aliens from different planets in his efforts to save the earth from intergalactic villains like Vilgax and Aggregor. Ben could choose from a field of ten different aliens, originally. But he can now apparently access many other forms, and the show has actually changed its name to “Ben 10 Ultimate Alien.” It’s pretty complex. Goop was one of the original ten alien forms Ben could assume. His species is a “polymorph,” according to the copy of Ben 10 Ultimate Alien Ultimate Guide Book (2010, Cartoon Network/Scholastic) that stays on the floor next to my kid’s bed. (And which, yuck!, smells like chocolate — which is now on my fingers and the keyboard to my computer. Apparently, my kid has been eating chocolate while looking at this book. Hopefully not while in bed. It was maybe not such a good idea to go to primary source material for this post. Should have just stayed with Wikipedia.) Anyway, “Ben will often transform into Goop when he needs to get into a tight space,” it says. “Goop can slip under a door and then reform into a humanoid shape.”

The fact that Goop is a 200-pound ball of shape-shifting slime reminds me of Paltrow’s performance in the 2001 movie Shallow Hal, in which she plays two versions of the same character, Rosemary. Rosemary is an obese person whom no one finds attractive. But because he’s been hypnotized by Tony Robbins, Hal, as played by Jack Black, sees only her “inner-beauty,” and falls in love with her. This is supposed to impart a positive message about the importance of being a good person and the disproportionate value society puts on traditional standards of physical beauty. But since Paltrow wears a great big fat-suit for scenes in which the viewer sees her in “real life,” and is slim and blonde and radiant in all her traditional beauty for the scenes in which we watch Jack Black fall in love with her, it doesn’t really work out that way. The movie was directed by the Farrelly Brothers.

Also, the Guidebook says that Goop the Ben 10 alien “secretes a powerful acid he can shoot out at opponents.” This reminds me of the time in the otherwise strangely compelling movie, Duets, when Paltrow sings Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’” with Huey Lewis, and we all had to feel it burn through our skin for months afterward (years, even) since it became an actual radio hit that you’d hear in the supermarket and Duane Reade and stuff. Remember that pain, and the acrid smell of burning flesh before you decide whether or not to press play here:

But I don’t mean to come down too hard on Goop — Gwyneth Paltrow, I mean. I should point out I that I thought she was good in The Royal Tennenbaums and The Talented Mr. Ripley and in the Iron Man movies. And, you know, she might like it if everyone started calling her Goop all the time. She must like the word, despite the fact that it rhymes with poop (or maybe because of that!). After all, that’s what she chose to call her website about how to live on $3,606.50 a day.

The eggheads do complain about their annual conference of eggheads put on by the Modern Language Association. So boring, one has been told, so exhausting. It’s crass and awful! The annual dread among those who have ascended to the glories of tenure is flavored strongly with guilt, too, because the MLA is also famously thronged with newly-minted Ph.D.s vying for the fewer and fewer tenure-track jobs on offer. Guilt, nerves, pressure, careerism and the sad foundering of humanities scholarship in our times!

This year the conference was held in Los Angeles, so I popped over there in order to see for myself how terrible this powwow really is, and found it to be so not even terrible. I loved every moment.

The 134-page MLA conference program gives the details of 821 separate events, each one featuring several speakers. The depth and richness, the awareness and sensitivity that goes into this work is evident just from the program. Here is a tiny sampling of the avalanche on offer:

• “Before the Pilgrims Landed, We Were Here: Puritanism and the Early Black Press”
• “Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth: Father as Fallen Superhero”
• “Global Sex Tourism and Abject Masculinity in William T. Vollman and Michel Houellebecq”
• “What’s Eating Slavoj Zizek?”
• Memory Writing from the Perspective of Neuroscience
• “Raperos, Boleros and Salseros: Reconsidering the Authentic in Cuban Popular Music since the Revolution”
• What the Digital Does to Reading
• “’What You See Is What You Get’?: Richard Pryor, Wattstax, and the Secret History of the Black Aesthetic”
• “’What Monster am I this Time?’ Laird Cregar, Oscar Wilde, and the Genres of Queer Horror”

(Really, what is eating Slavoj Zizek? I didn’t make it over there to hear the paper, but I still want to know.)

All these people dedicated to knowing the truth about such a variety of subjects; it made me weirdly happy to consider all the positive and fascinating things our culture somehow manages to achieve — despite all the well-warranted kvetching.

There was a wonderful sizzle of electricity in the air that I could feel the whole time, from the moment I arrived in the massive, kooky hotel atrium with its “arty” giant hanging light fixtures. These eggheads are agreeably chic; not art- or fashion-victim chic, but just grownup chic. They dress up for this thing, apparently. There’s a particular aesthetic, specific, sober, polyglot, involving muted colors, Italian leather, God in the details, etc. Haircuts that are flattering without being “interesting.” The jacket maybe a tiny bit on the shrunken side; the suit with trousers cut a little narrower than what a banker would wear, with Beatle boots. (And glasses, obviously.) Once in a while, a really appalling op-art tie. I understand that the sleeping around, once rampant, has fallen off in recent years. Maybe it’s too risky because nobody can afford to get into much job-related trouble these days.

The escalators were all a babel of Portuguese, English, French, Chinese, languages I didn’t recognize, spoken by chattering colleagues who hadn’t seen one another in ages, all excitedly catching up. It’s really loud, and there were interesting snatches of conversation to be caught on your way up or down. ‘La Clemenza di Tito’… “oh no, the Dragonspeak software is terrible, a catastrophe”; the word “shit” comes up far more often than I ever say it… “the Mignon wine bar, it’s very good, but overpriced … often and often, the phrase “close reading,” and the phrase “digital humanities.”

I had breakfast with a friend, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College. She’s happy and exhilarated too, but then she generally is; an elegant, funny, animated woman, slender and beautifully dressed, with luminous pale skin and dark hair in a pixie cut. Her schedule is brutal; whoever thinks these guys have it soft must not know any of them, I’ve often thought. To judge from her Twitter feed, KF is like Tom Hanks in that movie where he has to live in the airport for years on end. She’s wangled her way out of the airport for the moment, but for this conference she has got four or five sixteen-hour days in a row, several sessions and a meeting or two each day, then drinks and/or dinner with colleagues to talk more business. She’s on planning committees, in “informal working groups” for administrative projects such as deciding how the dissertation process might be altered to suit the demands of a changing profession. That alone is a decades-old struggle, stubbornly thorny and intractable. Today she will also preside over a discussion on the aforementioned Digital Humanities, her own field which is hot as a pistol.

We talked mostly about the role of public intellectuals: does it weaken or strengthen an academic to seek a broader audience? KF said it’s important to her to bring her own work to the public, but adds that there is a danger in that effort professionally; you may be perceived as less serious, as having diluted your message, if you are talking to “everybody.” But obviously there are people like Noam Chomsky and Jurgen Habermas who have completely transcended this problem.

Academic critics are not generally thought of as being in the same boat with journalists, or with popular critics of film or fiction, and yet both groups are charged with bringing the public… what? Let’s take it as read that both are working in the service of a free, humanistic spirit, and that the Chinese wall that has grown up between public and academic criticism could be made more porous to the advantage of all.

Me: So then, is the value of having public intellectuals coming out of the academy more to the advantage of the academy, or to the public?

KF: I think it works both ways. There is an interested and engaged public that wants to talk about whatever issues it is that we are interested in, I mean particularly in literary studies, right? There are so many people who are out there who are really passionately invested in books, and in talking about those books, and in really thinking about what’s going on in them, that we can contribute something to. It’s important for us to make that contribution because if we’re sort of closing ourselves off in the ivory tower mode of discussion amongst ourselves, well… it’s extraordinarily selfish.

It’s important for us to make this contribution, but it’s equally important for us to hear what’s coming back to us. In no small part higher education is in the straits that it is because a swath of the educated public, and of our elected government, has decided that education isn’t important; that we’re all doing this foolish research that doesn’t amount to anything. Until we’re able to get out there and demonstrate why the stuff we’re doing is important, and what it has to contribute to the public discussion of major issues, we’re not going to be able to change that in a way that’s going to save our institutions.

We moved on to a discussion of the kids who are here to interview, and how fierce the competition is. There are a lot of disciplines with little to no room at the top — pro and Olympic sports, classical music and so on. The highest reaches of the academy have always resembled these. It’s a question of love, I think; each of these very gifted humanities grad students loves his field so much that he’s willing to throw caution to the winds in hopes of making it to the top, and damn the torpedoes.

KF says that they’re thinking about doing away with the practice of conducting the first-round interviews in hotel rooms, and doing them on Skype instead. It’s very expensive and very stressful for young Ph.D.s, who are commonly poor as churchmice, to go along to these things. In the days when KF herself was interviewing, she says, apparently you would go at the appointed hour to the hotel room where your future might well begin, and then you might knock and one of your competitors would be in there being grilled, and there you’d be, staring at each other through the open door.

“Elevator eye!” I gasped.

“Totally,” she said.

So off we go, for I am tagging along, to a session:

282. Paper as Platform or Interface, 12:00 noon-1:15 p.m., Olympic III, J.W. Marriott Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Media and Literature. Presiding: Lisa Gitelman, New York Univ.

1. “Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper,” Joshua Calhoun, Univ. of Delaware, Newark
2. “Theory of Paper: Hume, Beattie, Derrida,” Christina Lupton, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor
3. “Wordsworths’ Daffodils: On the Page, upon the Inward Eye,” Richard Menke, Univ. of
Georgia

I adore Lisa Gitelman on contact; she’s got an ineffably gentle, sardonic air, kind of like Fran Lebowitz, very brilliant-seeming, only much kinder. Almost everything she says has a joke in it, and it takes me a second to catch on. There are thirty or so attendees, several of whom are working on open laptops. This, I learn, is a bone of contention. Since nobody can attend all the sessions in which he’s interested, a habit of Twittering-as-you-go has taken hold. The Twitter feeds have the hashtag #mla11. It’s a clever way of making more of the conference available to everyone, but traditionalists dislike the practice and there are passionate arguments about it that are still raging on the blogs over a week later.

This is a traditional session, meaning that each speaker will have fifteen or twenty minutes to read his or her work, followed by a Q&A; with the authors.

The first speaker, Joshua Calhoun, indulges himself in the word “palimpsested” which would drive me crazy if it weren’t so appropriate to what he’s saying, about how paper in the seventeenth century bore a well-understood relation to fiber, to worn-out clothing. It’s a really good paper about literature and mutability, about “the supreme idea vs. the dusty matter of human existence.”

The next paper is better still, even though early on Christina Lupton is describing in her grave, velvety English voice how “Derrida’s beguiling writing displaces and exceeds thought” and I am certain she’s going to lose me. But then she moves into David Hume and Enlightenment skepticism, into the slippery nature of “the material world’s empirical availability” and I’m all over it. She contrasts Hume’s elegant and adamantine doubts with the “certainty” of the poet James Beattie, whom I have never heard of, and who comes in for a pretty sound drubbing.

It’s not just the speaker’s voice that is velvety, it’s the whole experience. There is something so comforting and great about caring this much about the exact deficiencies in Hume’s thinking, and also about listening to someone whose worst and most violent insult I think might well be “unfortunate.” Plus Prof. Lupton is a terrific writer as well as a subtle and seductive thinker. “Common sense and skepticism bleed into each other”; “A catastrophic mutation into print.” It is comforting, too, that for all Hume’s skeptical insistence that no assumptions whatsoever be made regarding “this paper,” he was very fussy with his printers, and sweated blood over every error that found its way into his own books.

These are all discussions, it seems to me, that people outside the academy might very much be interested in — what purpose does the wall of academia serve? A lot of contemporary academic criticism of popular culture is super fun, vital and interesting, and I suspect all kinds of people would like to learn more about it, if it weren’t all hidden away, only to be consumed with a JSTOR subscription.

The MLA convention is probably the safest place on earth in which to make a pedantic joke, and the participants do not stint themselves in this regard. The third speaker, Richard Menke, is going to be yabbering on about that Wordsworth poem that I can’t stand, the one about wandering lonely as a cloud. Again I’m thinking no way for about thirty seconds before he has me in the palm of his hand. It turns out that Wordsworth wasn’t as lonely as a cloud at all, his sister Dorothy was there! And it all really happened, with the daffodils! Who knew? (Maybe I am the only one who didn’t know? On the upside, the poem reminds me of that old Genesis song.) Dorothy’s much more entertaining account of the affair turns out to have included the ham and potatoes they had for lunch. Prof. Menke has got a terrific coinage for the writerly descriptive flourishes of the Romantic period: “mnemotechnics.”

But the “paper” part of his talk hinges on the typesetting of the various versions of Wordsworth’s poem. Prof. Menke is highly engaging on this stuff. He goes, “BING!” in a high falsetto to indicate a printed asterisk (shades of Victor Borge!), and makes reference to “Daffodils 2.0.”

It becomes clear why the topic of paper is interesting to scholars in digital humanities; they are grappling in advance with the limitations of new media. What can they learn from the historical limitations of paper — not only in matters of preservation, but in the matter of understanding the nature and purposes of writing itself, of recording, in order to ensure that we do the best possible job of preserving and transmitting our culture to new generations, using our new media?

And then the questions, and they are good and interesting. Some of them challenge the speakers, who think very carefully and take their time before responding. There are some bits that sail straight past me, particularly regarding the finer points of Derrida. I think a lot of people would really enjoy this sort of thing, if they could experience it.

A.O. Scott wrote recently about ‘cultural elites’ in response to the crazy idea proposed by Neil Gabler in the Boston Globe that because of the Internet, the public has now got hold of the critical reins and will henceforth be enjoying the lowbrow stuff they really wanted to see all along.

Except: the mass culture critique is looking positively old-timey now that papers like “The Romantic Roots of High Postmodernism: Blade Runner as Neo- Romanticism” are routinely delivered at academic conferences.

Scott makes the point that the real “elites” are the corporations, whose stock in trade is not criticism, where you are tacitly asked to compare your own opinion to the critic’s; it’s marketing, where you’re being told what to buy. There is a great distinction to be made here between leading the conversation, as good critics and academics do, asking all to participate and to judge and compare their own responses to the responses of those who are leading the discussion, and attempts to manipulate or control the conversation, as marketers do. One is free, the other is not.

Maybe more participation from the academy in public discourse can help forestall bad policy decisions, such as the recent Comcast merger, by stimulating participation the way good criticism does. And a broader public dissemination and discussion of academic works can create a new understanding among the public that can help serve, support and improve the academy, too.

Patton Oswalt’s curious epitaph to to Geek Culture a month ago in Wired

addressed these questions from the other side; he makes a kind of gatekeeper’s argument, that the widespread embrace of geek culture (owing, he thinks, to the explosion of once-arcane information on the web) somehow spoiled that culture, as if it were a band that was cooler before everyone else found out about it; he complains about “Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells.” This is just like saying that academic criticism can’t be popular; that walls should be built up around privileged information. It’s an argument that falls to pieces under the slightest scrutiny. Cultural criticism of every kind can only be made deeper, better and richer by increasing the cross-pollination as much as we can. Curious, engaged, interested people of all kinds can join in shared interests, inside the academy and out.

Something KF said to me stuck: “In discussions like Oprah’s Book Club, there’s the ethics of our approach to public discussions of literary texts; we have an obligation to listen to what amateur readers are saying about these texts. But I think the obligation extends in the other direction, too, I think we have the obligation to speak, and to say, here is why I read this text the way I do, here’s what you can kind of get from it and understand about culture by looking at it from this perspective.”

It is worth remembering that the MLA was founded by a pack of academic renegades in 1883, in an attempt to break the stranglehold of Greek and Roman classics on language instruction in higher education. It was an effort, originally, to connect the academy more closely with the outside world that it was meant to serve. So how about it, MLA? After all, the MLA could be TED, just a century and a couple decades older.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

Should alcoholic beverages contain labels that provide health and nutritional information? As an enthusiast of excessive inebriation, I am fully in favor of this increasingly likely possibility. It would be nice to be able to calculate how many calories I need to avoid from food to better indulge my passion for drink. I mean, assuming I’m sober enough to do the math, which seems unlikely. Still, I want the option. This gut isn’t going to shrink itself, you know.

by Lilit Marcus

“59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” Simon & Garfunkel

“Bled White,” Elliott Smith

“Brooklyn,” They Might Be Giants

“Chelsea Morning,” Joni Mitchell

“Christmas in Hollis,” Run-D.M.C.

“Coney Island,” Death Cab for Cutie

“Eleanor, Put Your Boots On,” Franz Ferdinand

“Empire State of Mind,” Jay-Z feat Alicia Keys

“Going to Queens,” The Mountain Goats

“I And Love And You,” The Avett Brothers

“Living for the City,” Stevie Wonder

“My Blue Manhattan,” Ryan Adams

“My My My Metrocard,” Le Tigre

“Myriad Harbour,” The New Pornographers

“Positively 4th Street,” Bob Dylan

“Rhapsody In Blue,” George Gershwin

“Song for Myla Goldberg,” The Decemberists

“Take the A Train,” Duke Ellington

“The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” Magnetic Fields

“Tom’s Diner,” Suzanne Vega

“Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou Reed

“You Said Something,” PJ Harvey

Lilit Marcus, the former editor of Jewcy, is Editor in Chief of The Gloss.

“Ohio says it’s switching its lethal injection drug to an anesthetic commonly used to euthanize pets as a shortage of the drug normally used for executions has worsened. The Department of Rehabilitation and Correction says the state will use a single, powerful dose of pentobarbital. It’s a common anesthetic used in surgeries and by veterinarians.”

I have never, ever in my life had anyone say to me that former New Republic owner Marty Peretz is gay! Though, now that I think about it, I realize that I’ve never had a discussion about him at all.

“For the most part, I have no idea what the lyrics of Kaputt pertain to, except for ‘Suicide Demo For Kara Walker.’ Which is odd, because the writing seems really specific compared to all the other Destroyer albums, whose lyrics I happen to understand very well and can explain 110 percent and always have been able to. That being said, there is a colonial sound to the record, which maybe is playing off the lyrics. I was thinking a lot about dissolute officers and envoys with cushy posts, strung out on opium. By ‘a lot,’ I mean I thought about that more than once, even if just as an audio reference. That’s what Roxy Music’s Avalon sounds like to me.”
 — Dan Bejar discusses Destroyer’s new record, which, oh my God you guys, is so so good. Don’t let descriptions like “ambient contemporary” put you off; by the third time you listen to this thing all the way through you won’t want to listen to anything else.

“The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that Chicago ballots must include Rahm Emanuel’s name, issuing a stay of a lower-court order that said he wasn’t qualified to run for mayor.” Also: “The court has not decided whether to hear Emanuel’s appeal of Monday’s Illinois Appellate Court ruling that tossed him out of the race to replace Mayor Daley. But the Supreme Court granted Emanuel’s motion for a stay of the ruling.”

People who hate flying all pretty much hate the usual things. They hate: turbulence, confinement, heights, strange sensations of velocity or tilt, being out of control, and, of course, other people. And there’s lots of these phobic people! It’s the most popular of all of our modern phobias. The other day, someone asked: what are the most important things to do in life before I have a baby next year? And I was like: fly on airplanes all the time, because flying phobias often have their onset when people have babies. (That’s because that’s when straight people finally realize their mortality. Silly straight people.)

There are plenty of programs that can help with fear of flying. The older desensitization or inundation-method programs — they take you to the airport, they teach you about planes, then pretty soon they stuff you on one and call you fixed — have given way to programs that teach you how to treat and rewire your anxieties. Often more effective!

Those are great. Hey man: whatever works. But there’s a third fear of flying program. I’ve patented it. It’s easy. And I’m going to give it to you for free!

Dress up.
You know who dies in plane crashes and loses at life in general? People who wear sweatpants and ugly stuff to the airport. If you treat yourself as important and classy, you’ll be treated as such. Men should put on a tie! Everyone should wear something fabulous. It makes you feel a thousand times better. Pretend that you’re getting on a glamorous ocean liner.

At least you’re not sailing the North Atlantic.
You know who dies in transit? People who have to travel on glamorous ocean liners. Think about this constantly. At least you’re not heaving and yawing on some hideous rustbucket in a freezing ocean — for a week.

Turbulence is fun.
Watch the flight attendants in case you’re worried: they don’t give a shit. The pilot is probably napping through it. Turbulence isn’t anything — it’s this thing we made up, you’re mostly just going from one bit of air going one way to air going another. Big deal! People just like to have something to worry about.

Appreciate the private time.
Sure you might be wall to wall with strangers, and you even might have WiFi if you’re going coast-to-coast. But airplane time is the one time in this world when you have an excuse to not answer emails, to watch a crappy movie, to sit and zone out, to read a book, trash or otherwise. This is a significant and novel freedom!

Be a rich white man.
Here’s the most important component of my patented program. You know how famous and rich people are traveling around the world constantly? (This is why you always overhear great things at airports and on planes, like on-air talent yelling at top volume at network heads and then at their agents right before they sign up with another network, ahem.) Rich white men and famous people (except Kate Bush and David Bowie) don’t give a shit about flying. You know why? Because they expect everything to be taken care of for them. And guess what? It is. They don’t have to care! They’re busy running the world. Dealing with tasks like flying a plane or making dinner, that is outside their purview. All they want is another scotch and to cheat on their wives in a hotel room when they arrive at whatever rich place they’re going and to get more money. Rich white men always are getting on planes so as to get more paper. So act like that. Get a pedicure, get your hair did: you too can be a rich white man, but you can’t be a rich white man if you never go anywhere and you don’t treat yourself like you’re the most important thing in the world. So won’t you spend some time thinking about yourself? You don’t have to be a dick when you get off the plane — but it sure helps being self-centered when you’re on it. You may think I’m joking, but I’m deadly serious here: muster up all the entitlement you can and ride it out. It almost works for Arianna Huffington, but the secret is also to be super-gracious to the plane crew and the people around you. That’s what the really rich people like to do. Like you!