In short, almost literally no one knew that the chairwoman of Hearst Publications was going to be taking on the post of New York City Schools Chancellor. Not even Gayle King! But good news, I guess. “On Monday, Ms. Black was seen at the Hearst Tower with a thick stack of materials concerning public education.” That’s excellent, she’s learning about public schools before she RUNS ALL OF THEM.

Mary HK Choi strikes again on the Times Opinionator blog.

Dino De Laurentiis has died at the age of 91. From Barbarella to Conan the Barbarian to Dune to Blue Velvet to Bound, De Laurentiis had his hand in films that were radical, challenging, dreadful and sometimes all three of those.

You know the panicky, paranoid manner in which the Tea Partiers appear to cling to their guns and religion, as if someone really were trying to take them away? For some of us, the same condition of ongoing nerves regarding the encroaching powers of the State comes instead from a V for Vendetta- or Fahrenheit 451-type terror of the State coming after our books. Various States have indeed come after all of these assets, from time to time, so it’s not like any of us is entirely making this stuff up. At this very moment they don’t let Chinese people or Cubans or Belarusians or many, many others all over this world read whatever they want, watch whatever movies they want, or have all the guns and/or religion they want.

So if there is to be a fear of the increasing adoption of e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle, B&N; Nook and iPad, that is by far the scariest thing about it, because if you were to keep all your books on such a device, some villain really could come along one day and pretty much flip the switch and take all your books away — and not just yours but everyone’s, all at once. What if we had some kind of latter-day Dick Cheney deciding to take action against the despicable, dangerous pointy-heads? Boom! Nothing left to read but George W. Bush’s memoirs.

Nick Negroponte has been going around saying that physical books will be mass-produced for only maybe another five years. His reasoning is opaque, I must say, and appears to have something to do with the fact that books are hard to send to Africa. I hope he realizes that printed books are, in effect, a guarantee of civil liberties, and that we will continue to need them.

Anyways. Despite all these speculative-fiction-induced terrors, my husband gave me a Kindle for my birthday some weeks ago and I love it SO MUCH, no matter what Joan Didion says. Thousands and thousands of books fit on this pretty, if potentially sinister, little machine. I just go over to Project Gutenberg and vacuum stuff up like the textual whale that I am, because I have no literary discernment whatsoever and will gladly spend the afternoon reading Agatha Christie or really, literally, almost anything. Project Gutenberg is now up to 33,000 free e-books, all out-of-copyright and so classics mostly; almost all of them are available in .mobi format, which looks fantastic on the Kindle. You don’t have to feel the least bit guilty as you might even at a thrift shop, where whatever you buy, it is all going to take up room on bookshelves that you know you do not have; these books take up no extra room whatsoever, and you can just delete them when you are done!

I bet you will be surprised to hear when Project Gutenberg first started. 1971 (!) is the true answer, and could they ever destroy every Final Jeopardy contestant with that one, I bet. Project Gutenberg’s founder, Michael Hart, is a most unusual and interesting man: the ultimate anti-corporatist. Like Yoda, Mr. Hart doesn’t appear to possess much glamour or power on the outside, but he is bursting with such things on the inside. He doesn’t care two pins about money, hasn’t had a salary for years and acquires the few bits of stuff he seems to need at garage sales.

In the 1970s, nobody really had a clue that computers would come to be used for the mass storage of valuable information. It simply hadn’t occurred to anyone yet that the computer would be useful for anything but, well, computation. It was so shockingly, incredibly good at that! There was such a lot of computation that needed to be done; computation was first in line.

Now it emerges that whoever controls the storage effectively will effectively control the media commons. There are a lot of champions in this fight, but Michael Hart saw it all coming decades ago, and started typing his fool head off, dozens and dozens of whole books, long before OCR was a gleam in a programmer’s eye. Hart has done more to secure the future of the public domain than anyone else in the world, I believe. These widely distributed books cannot be taken away; when they’re downloaded and stored on private devices and media, it’s like insurance for Western Civ.

My first few times on Project Gutenberg I downloaded a lot of quite rare early Wodehouse (highly recommended: The Swoop! or, How Clarence Saved England) and also a lot of Thackeray, Gibbon, pretty much all of Mrs. Gaskell and, just by accident, Émile Gaboriau’s La Vie Infernale — the fruitiest, most marvelous 19th-c. French melodrama (in two parts: The Count’s Millions and Baron Trigault’s Vengeance. I just love that guy. Plus Shakespeare and the King James Bible and that sort of stuff.

The only book I’ve bought for the Kindle so far is Infinite Jest, which is far and away my favorite modern novel. A few days later, I was having a little dispute with my husband over whether or not Wallace misuses the word “ilk” in that book, which with the Kindle’s search feature took about twenty seconds to settle (A: not really; it appears just once, in the quoted speech of Madame Psychosis.) It’s all thrillingly searchable, and browsable, plus once you get a book on your Kindle (or Nook, or equiv.) you can highlight things and also make your own notes anywhere you like.

Whoever wonders whether one will buy fewer real books because one has got an e-reader, I can tell you that the answer is alas no, not necessarily. One may quite easily wind up buying more books, if anything, because the getting of books is on one’s mind more.

So all that is the upside of having a Kindle.

On the other hand, my Fahrenheit-451-paranoia was fanned into a giant flaming ball of fear-napalm when I looked into the personal ownership of my own Kindle e-books and files, as one should.

In July of 2009, you may remember, Amazon came stealthily along and deleted e-copies of 1984 (no seriously, they did) and Animal Farm from people’s Kindles — copies they’d already paid for and downloaded — because it turned out that there was a rights problem with the e-publisher. Jeff Bezos wound up apologizing all over himself and taking it all back and promising never to do that ever again, but the fact remains that Amazon has some kind of access to your Kindle files and can literally remove them, if they feel like it, which is downright creepy, and if it were your computer you would not like it one little bit.

Indeed, Amazon can semi-brick your Kindle if they decide you’ve been abusing their service, say by returning too much stuff. And I bet they could brick the whole thing, if they really wanted to. I don’t imagine many of us care for the idea of some corporation having that kind of control over our personal libraries.

Having learned all this, I went along and had a closer look at the current Kindle License Agreement. There is some simply petrifying stuff on there. For starters, you don’t “own” Kindle books, you’re basically renting them.

Unless otherwise specified, Digital Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.

They can change the software on you whenever they like:

Automatic Updates. In order to keep your Software up-to-date, Amazon may automatically provide your Kindle or Other Device with updates/upgrades to the Software.

That is how a totalitarian state would go about confiscating books, if they wanted to. There is nothing in this agreement to stop Amazon from modifying the Kindle software to make it impossible for you to read any of your own files on the device. Such a step is not actually forbidden to them by this agreement; they are under no obligation to protect any data you might be storing on there. That’s not to say that there aren’t laws at least in some states that might allow you to sue for damages; I’m just saying, there isn’t any promise made by Amazon to protect your data or preserve its readability.

They can also change the terms of the deal or simply shut down Kindle service entirely, anytime they like:

Changes to Service. We may modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, at any time.

Or they might decide to shut your account down:

Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software, and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without refund of any fees. Amazon’s failure to insist upon or enforce your strict compliance with this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of any of its rights.

Keep in mind these are your books that you bought or collected. Can you imagine a bookseller or publisher asserting rights over the contents of your bookshelves in your house? That’s basically what we’re talking about, here.

Disclaimer of Warranties. USE OF THE SERVICE, KINDLE, KINDLE STORE, DIGITAL CONTENT, AND SOFTWARE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK.

It might blow up! LOL JK, well, your books might.

Limitation of Liability. [Blah blah blah] THE LAWS OF CERTAIN JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES [blah blah] YOU MAY HAVE ADDITIONAL RIGHTS.

I feel I must! I know I must, somehow.

Oh, and this is from their Privacy (HA!) Policy:

Information from Other Sources
Examples of information we receive from other sources include updated delivery and address information from our carriers or other third parties, which we use to correct our records and deliver your next purchase or communication more easily; account information, purchase or redemption information, and page-view information from some merchants with which we operate co-branded businesses or for which we provide technical, fulfillment, advertising, or other services (such as Target.com); search term and search result information from some searches conducted through the Web search features offered by our subsidiaries, Alexa Internet and A9.com; search results and links, including paid listings (such as Sponsored Links); and credit history information from credit bureaus, which we use to help prevent and detect fraud and to offer certain credit or financial services to some customers.

So don’t worry or anything, but Amazon is looking at your credit history, too.

After reading all this, I rang the (excellent, and very polite) Kindle customer service up to learn more, especially about privacy issues. One thing I wanted to know was exactly how much access Amazon has to my private, personal Kindle files (you can put your own files on a Kindle, .txt and .pdf files that you made yourself.) But after being bumped up through a couple of layers of supervisors, I didn’t get very clear answers to my questions. For instance, on the question of Amazon’s remote access to my personal stuff. “We don’t have access to your files,” I was first told. But can you see my personal files? And if you wanted to delete my personal files, as was done with the Orwell books, could you do it? “We don’t do that.”

Yeah, but could you?

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

Photo from Flickr by Windell Oskay.

“Picture it: London. 1624. You got a little carried away with John Donne, who recited ‘The Flea’ at you until you succumbed. But! Your wedding to a cheese merchant is in a week. He expects you to stain the sheets. What do you do?”

by Meghan Keane

Thanksgiving at my parents’ house always comes with some surprises. Mostly because we invite a lot of strangers. Not strangers exactly. You need to know one family member to get into a Keane Family Thanksgiving. My mother has been teaching English as a second language for over 30 years. And she kindly invites students who don’t have family nearby to our house for Thanksgiving. That invitation has then been extended to myriad friends, acquaintances and coworkers over the years. And sometimes, those guests don’t behave themselves.

Which is actually a good thing. Because it distracts us from fighting amongst ourselves.

And sometimes the surprise is positive, like the time that my mom’s Albanian friends Frederick and Aida changed into traditional Greek dancing outfits after dinner and started serenading everyone with folk songs and their original songs. Guess where they were in May of 2007? In Berlin going to the finals of Eurovision. No big deal. We didn’t find that out until a few years later. At this particular Thanksgiving we just knew that Frederick was “famous in Albania.”

But most often, the surprise is whose guest will offend, shock or annoy everyone else. My mom usually wins this contest, because her pool of contestants is so much larger. Her guests have mispronounced her name, broken her belongings, and one of her septuagenarian guests even cornered and kissed one of her own daughters on the lips. (Me. Ech. Still scarred by that one.) But sometimes it’s someone else’s church friend who is a loud talker, or a college friend who is rude, or an acquaintance who needs to be driven home because he drank too much and his wife doesn’t know how to drive.

Thankfully, the surprises aren’t usually food related. My mom’s a great cook and the only variable in the menu is dessert. People usually bring desserts with them. But it’s pretty hard to screw up dessert in any significant way. Even if your sweets are bad, or dry or too sugary, their failings can easily be excused by the fact that they have been preceded by too much food — and excess tryptophan.

We tried that this same year, when my Czech roommate Monika brought her weird sour cream, lady finger and tinned orange dessert to Thanksgiving. But she had an even worse surprise in store for us: party food guilt.

This particular Thanksgiving was during our roommate honeymoon phase. It was before she started leaving me passive aggressive notes and before she attempted to extort me. Though, in retrospect, there were signs of things to come that I probably should have paid attention to. (Who refuses to pay tip and tax when they split a meal at a diner?)

But this was in the heady days where we were politely giving each other the benefit of the doubt. Missing home, I think she was glad to be invited to our Thanksgiving, and wanted to bring a piece of the Czech Republic to our family event. It was a great thought, and I was excited to taste the cake she couldn’t stop talking about in the days before Thanksgiving.

Except I’m pretty sure she made it wrong. Some ingredient was missing, or got added in at the wrong point. Maybe she combined two recipes that weren’t related. At least there wasn’t meat in it?

It would be easier to explain this dessert if I could find a recipe for the thing and figure out if it actually exists or was just a weird mishap that my roommate had mistakenly compiled from memory. But Google has failed me so far. Here’s what it consisted of (as best I can remember): lady fingers covered in sour cream, with bits of fruit — like grapes, banana slices and canned tangerines — mixed in amongst the cookies.

If it sounds at all like tiramisu, I think that was the plan. But it veered off somewhere. The trick to tiramisu is adding coffee or liquor to make the whole thing meld together into a delicious creamy cake. There was none of that here. And instead of sweetened mascarpone cheese, the cream base was sour. Also, there was fresh and canned fruit involved. Here’s my opinion on mixing sour cream with citrus: Ew.

Have you ever eaten lady fingers on their own? No. Because they’re dry and bland and terrible. That’s why you need to drown them in liquid to make tiramisu.

Here, they had maintained their store-bought cardboard texture. Again, all of this could be easily ignored. That tin foil pan of cream and cookies looked nast. And nobody was lining up to pile any on their plate. Which is usually when the Thanksgiving excuses come in handy:

“Oh. I ate so much turkey. No room!”

“Man. Those tinned tangerines look AMAZING. But I can’t eat another bite.”

“Pass!”

Except Monika was so excited about and proud of her dessert, that she kept hovering over the dessert table, encouraging people to try her concoction. And worse, asking them what they thought after they ate it.

If there is a worse habit than delivering terrible food to a party, it has to be pressuring strangers in search of compliments. I decided to ignore the look of this thing and put some on my plate. But once I tasted it, I made a beeline away from Monika. It was so bad. It hurts my teeth thinking about it. Also, I have a quick gag reflex. And I’m bad at lying.

In these situations, avoidance is usually the best tactic. But there was one more snag in this plan. Next to that weird Czech concoction, there was a beautiful, pristine tray of tiramisu. Honestly, no one has brought tiramisu to my parents’ house before or since this one Thanksgiving. But when the desserts were laid out on the table, there it was. And that lightly dusted with cinnamon dessert sat directly next to the grape fingers, gently mocking Monika’s attempt at dessert.

Also, I would like to say. It was completely delicious. I may even have sneaked some back to our apartment in an unidentifiable plastic container and secretly eaten it for most of the following week, guiltily indulging and hoping I could avoid admitting to Monika how it got there.

I don’t even like tiramisu that much. But this tiramisu. Man, it was given to us by the gods.

If they weren’t spiritual gods, then they were definitely Euro gods. Because in addition to singing in four different languages, it turns out Aida can make magic out of lady fingers. And as she sang strange folk songs and danced in her Greek vestments next to Frederic’s skirt, the tiramisu slowly disappeared.

That night in my parents’ living room, their performance was a bit like this…

…but with more confused partygoers trying to figure out how you say Thanksgiving in Greek. Also, because I’m still scared of canned fruit, here’s an approximate recipe for Aida’s magical tiramisu:

6 egg yolks
3 tablespoons sugar
1 pound mascarpone cheese
1 1/2 cups strong espresso, cooled
2 teaspoons Kahlua
24 packaged ladyfingers
cinnamon for garnish

Whisk the eggs and sugar together. And the mascarpone and one tablespoon of espresso. Beat until smooth. Put the rest of the coffee and the rum/Kahlua in a bowl. Dip the lady fingers in the bowl for a few seconds and then line the dish you’ll be using with a layer of lady fingers. Spread half of the mascarpone over the cookies. Put another layer of lady fingers in the dish, and top with more mascarpone. Put in the fridge for two hours. Dust with cinnamon before serving.

Meghan Keane really loved that tiramisu.

Illustration by the marvelous Susie Cagle.

I mean, did they invent some new kind of “meta” and not tell me about it? Anti-meta? So confused!

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has never smashed a Whac-A-Mole game in a drunken fit. He has never invoked Freedom of Information laws to find out a female federal employee’s work schedule. And to the best of anyone’s knowledge, he has never washed his car in the White House driveway.

But to readers of The Onion, the satirical newspaper and Web site, the vice president has done all of those things, plus bounce a check for $39.50 to a liquor store and star in advertisements for Hennessy cognac that emphasize his international playboy swagger.

Right? What? That paper will write about ANYONE.

Would you like to see a picture of a baby turtle with two heads? Of course you would.

To conflate today’s major themes of smoking and language, let me put something to you: Why is there no good single word that conveys the need to smoke? When one has hunger one is hungry; when one thirsts one is thirsty. What is one when he desperately needs to run out of the bar and have a cigarette RIGHT NOW?

“Smoky” obviously does not work, what with all its other connotations. I have long considered “nicky,” evoking as it does nicotine, as a possible solution, but I am troubled by that errant “k” in there (I will not abide deviation from the root) and rendering it as “nicy” is problematic for when it is printed. (I once had an argument with a colleague over the correction orthography for “vag” — a reference to the female pudendum — which she insisted on spelling as “vadge” because it read more clearly; I took her point, but it still rankles, as I’m something of a traditionalist in these matters.) “Nickfitty” is a distasteful, bastardized conjunction that I refuse to even examine. “Ciggy” sounds too much like something an upper class drunk in a high society comedy of the Thirties would use to describe the actual smokable material, while “butty” just makes you think of someone who’s all ass.

The conundrum may be moot; how much longer will we even be able to smoke? But I think we should at least do our best to find the proper descriptor while we still can, so that future generations — if there are any — can look back at the world in which we lived and sigh longingly for our glamor and drug dependency. We owe them that, at least. So here we are: a single word, with a -y ending, that expresses the frenzied need for a cigarette. Any ideas?

by Spencer Lund

When you walk into Chipotle, don’t look ashamed or frightened. You’re eating some righteous food, so own up to it. Stride purposely to the first stop at the Chipotle station and in a commanding voice say: “I’ll have a burrito with black beans and steak.”

Other appropriate orders: barbacoa and steak mix or just barbacoa. To paraphrase Anthony Bourdain for a second (who wouldn’t be caught dead in Chipotle), chicken is for people who don’t know what they want.

Also, if you decide to order a burrito bowl, or God forbid, the tacos, then you need to reevaluate where you’re getting your meal. This isn’t some namby-pamby Taco Bell and there are rules. Rule number one is: you can’t half-ass the caloric intake.

Vegetarian Chipotle orders are as ridiculous as they sound, and should be avoided at all costs. If you’re a vegetarian, good for you, but stay the fuck outta my Chipotle. There’s probably some refuse they feed rabbits up the street.

Feel free to add the peppers and onions to your burrito as well, but always include meat [insert lesbian joke to spur certain commentators here]. Also, if you want some extra meat, GO FOR IT! Never shy away from asking for more, as they are 100% of the time amenable to more. You may have to pay for it, but we’ll discuss that later.

In terms of the black vs. pinto bean debate that’s been raging for centuries, pinto beans have always struck me as being too healthy. Also, black beans taste better. I’m too lazy to look up the actual science behind my intuition, but if anyone can prove that pinto beans are actually worse for you than black beans, I will gladly change my Chipotle ritual and you can even read the eulogy at my funeral for my heart failure at 50.

After they’ve added your peppers, onions, steak and black beans, don’t let up. You’ve only just begun. Generally, you now move down the stations, and so you must speak to another employee. That means you need to impress him or her with your confidence all over again, like you did with your commanding voice at the first station. I hope I’m not the first one to tell you this, but don’t throw your jilted Spanish at the poor employees. I don’t care if you spent six months in Spain doing some hot man or woman after taking “like the best Molly EVER” at some rave. You’re not Spanish. If you do speak Spanish as a legitimate first language, go for it. (You can only claim Spanish as a first language if you were born in a country where it is the official or most-spoken language, or you learned it from your parents around the house and learned English later because you live in America. Or I guess England and/or Canada.)

This is the proper way to go about ordering from the second (and generally final) station. This is also where you really come into your own and they’ll respect you more for it.

“I’d like some corn.” Wait until the corn as been added.

“And some tomato.” Wait until the tomato has been scooped and added. Your burrito should look pretty monstrous already, but we have more to add.

“Some hot sauce please…”

This is where things get emphatic.

“LOTS OF CHEESE.”

“SOUR CREAM TOO, LOTS OF IT.”

Cheese and sour cream are the two things you must ask for extra. There’s no clearly defined rule about this, so take advantage of their ambiguity and ask for more. I do this with the meat as well, but then beg off when they inform me it will cost extra. Some day they will not mention this and I will get free extra meat.

This is a big moment here. Maybe add a bit of lettuce, but the real issue of contention here is the guacamole. For all you clowns that swear by the “really fresh guacamole” they make “right in front of you” at your over-priced Dos Caminos, then maybe you want some guacamole on the side here, so you can sniff at it and make foodie comments about how it’s so bland, or there aren’t enough tomatos and onions, yadda yadda yadda. When I have the money (not often), I ask for guacamole even though it’s ridiculous that they charge you an extra $2.50 for it. I also have them add it to my burrito. I will then politely ask them to mush everything together. Just ask — many people forget this.

After everything has been added, your chipoista (I just made that up) should have trouble fitting everything into the burrito. If the burrito tears and they have to add a second tortilla, CONGRATULATIONS, you ordered the proper way.

And if you’ve impressed the manager so much that he says “That’s a big fuckin’ Burrito” as you’re paying, then not only have you done your job well, but I’d like to go out to lunch with you. It was the proudest day of my life. This manager watches burritos being made all day long, so if you have impressed him/her to the extent of f-bomb dropping, you know you’re good.

I know a lot of people are hesitant to ask for them to mix everything, or add something extra, but if you can’t take command of a food-related situation, you probably shouldn’t be going to Chipotle anyway. They’ll respect you less if you stay mum. It’s a man eat dog world out there (quite possibly literally), and if you’re not prepared to do this right, you should just hit some deli salad bar and stay out of my way.

Spencer Lund is an editor at a start-up company, so is extremely poor and only has time for haphazard freelancing. He has a Tumblr that he plans on deleting. You also shouldn’t follow him on Twitter since most of what he Tweets is depressing.

Photo by Aranami from Flickr.