A new study shows that women who take birth control pills are jealous and possessive. Also, they hate babies.

If you haven’t read Ian Frazier’s story about Asian Carp in this week’s New Yorker yet, you should. (You’ll have to pay cash, but that’s okay.

) It’s an excellent piece about a serious subject, but it also entertains — as any story about fish that jump out of the air and into people’s boats is liable to. The most entertaining part, I thought, was Frazier’s account of the 2010 Redneck Fishing Tournament, an annual event held along the Illinois River in Bath, Illinois.

“Prizes are given for the most fish and best costumes. This year, a hundred and five boats (at a fifty-dollar entry fee apiece) competed before a crowd of about two thousand in the events two days. The method of fishing was straightforward: flush the carp from the water with boat engines and snatch them from the air with nets. There was also barbecuing, beer drinking, karaoke singing, games for children and teenagers, bluegrass bands, booths selling T-shirts, etc. Among the crowd, T-shirt adages were on the order of ‘Friends Don’t Let Friends Fish Sober’ and ‘What Happens in the Barn Stays in the Barn.’”

Here are some YouTube videos people made at this year’s tournament.

Wait a second, WHAT? “The Wines of The Times column last Wednesday, about Sonoma zinfandels, misstated the provision of the federal labeling law on alcohol content. Wines listing an alcohol content of 14 percent or less by volume are permitted a 1.5 percentage-point margin of error, as long as the actual content does not exceed 14 percent, and wines listing an alcohol content above 14 percent are permitted a 1 percentage-point margin of error, as long as the actual content is more than 14 percent.” I am exactly the kind of drunk who buys his wine based on alcohol content. This is incredibly disturbing.

Hey, remember a couple weeks ago, when Cee-Lo performed that great, uncensored version of “Fuck You” on Later With Jools Holland? Well, turns out he performed another song from his soon-to-come Lady Killer album that night, too. “Old Fashioned,” it’s called. And that’s the way it sounds, too. But in a really good way.

Some wee changes have occurred here overnight! Upgrades and things. We may be a little bit dodgy this morning. Send us your bug reports if you like (include browser and operating system and pictures if you can)!

Chimpanzee Rampage would be a good name for a band, if it’s not already. Anyway, one happened in Kansas City. Here’s footage!

“I did place a call to Ms. Hill at her office extending an olive branch to her after all these years, in hopes that we could ultimately get passed what happened so long ago. That offer still stands, I would be very happy to meet and talk with her if she would be willing to do the same. Certainly no offense was ever intended.”
 — Virginia Thomas, right-wing activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, explains why she left a message on Anita Hill’s voicemail asking the Brandeis University professor to “consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.” In 1991, during Thomas’ confirmation hearings, Hill testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked under him at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Hill refused to apologize and stands by her statements.

In the history of serious documentary film, there are two strains, it seems fair to say. One has been on the recent upswing: the advocacy documentary, propelled along by Michael Moore and that Al Gore-with-a-deadly-PowerPoint movie, which, TL;DW. (Really, I remember thinking when that came out: The planet’s going bad? Just send me a position paper, and if I want to watch Al Gore I’ll turn on C-Span 2 or whatever, and, no I probably won’t, I’m just being polite.) The advocacy documentary is probably good for the world, as with all kinds of advocacy projects, whether they be litigation or burning cop cars on Rue d’Whatever in favor of not having to work for two more years into one’s 60s. But at some point-that point likely being “about six years ago”-I joined my fellow Americans in not being willing to sit through another film that reminds me about how chickens in America grow up neck-deep in their own shit. I know that! I don’t eat the shit-raised cannibal chickens! I’m not stupid. And if you are stupid enough to eat American commercially raised chickens, well you’re probably not watching documentaries about food, are you now. So then there is the other, more noble strain of documentary.

That’s depictive documentary, such as most Maysles films and “Jersey Shore” (yup, parent and child right there) and “Jackass” the TV show and Jackass: The Movie, Jackass Number Two and Jackass 3D, which raced no less than Werner Herzog to the cinemas to be among the first to usher in the era of 3D documentary.

Herzog’s film is about Chauvet cave art and so, just like Jackass 3D, it is also about mortality and what we value, fear and leave behind as a record of our time.

We are exiting-we’re pretty sure, at least, that we’re exiting!-ages of great repression and loathing. (It’s not impossible however that things could suddenly turn more puritanical and bizarre, and if so, our apologies to people in the future reading this.) The proscription against exhibiting male genitalia, our great cultural loathing at basic bodily functions, our fear of public embarrassment and attention, our wrath at the inability of modern medicine to make us less mortal: these are what made the Jackass project so important and vital. Our time, the future should know, was obsessed with how we die. It is literally all we could think about, accidents and disasters and cancer and falling apart and always, always, our great horror at the unforeseeable.

That people get hit in the balls and fall down quite often is sort of secondarily wonderful.

For those of us who fear the coming of the future idiocracy (at least as much as we fear the rise of the police and robot states), we approach a project like the Jackass franchise with some trepidation. The question is, indeed, only how soon it will be until a farting butt wins the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and if you’ve seen the trailer for the new Gus Van Sant movie, Restless, you may think that the answer is conceivably PROBABLY REAL SOON.

And the Jackass franchise could have gone either way. In this strange world of theirs, almost always utterly woman-less, packs of boys-swiftly aging into old man-boys-live among the ruins of technology. There are things with motors, things with engines. It is possible, the boys decide, to use the power of these machines in ways unintended, and so they skip through a primer on the laws of inertia and gravity and physics as a test of what comedy is, and what bodies are, putting into practice the kinds of ideas that occur when we are waking up from a nap and have a strange and stupid idea. (You know how it is when you wake up suddenly: Why is all the furniture on the floor, you think-How shortsighted, there are walls and a ceiling too!)

When they are not looking outside, at things that are bouncy or blowy or exploding-ey, they are looking at themselves, in the manner of all boys in their bedrooms. What’s most telling about the Jackass franchise to me is how they move without transition from issues of social embarrassment (dressing up as old people and ruining things) to technology-play (motors and engines) to bodies (specifically, barf and shit).

It’s the barf and shit that does me in-I’m the great Victorian holdout when it comes to this. I am being left behind by our forward-looking times. In the near future, we’ll all crap together. People will throw up in the streets and on the subways, and no one will think anything of it! Men will pee together in little pots in the streets of Berlin and Philadelphia!

I cannot at this time watch and listen to people really throwing up and crapping into the air (as one lad dramatically does in Jackass 3D) without an accompanying physical horror, obviously instilled in me by those, yes, etc., etc., outgoing and dated mores and outmoded fear-of-disease from a time past. It’s my monkey brain, with Queen Victoria’s superego. In short I cannot watch people throwing up and so I’ll never know how this fine, terrific, entertaining motion picture ended. I held out as long as I could but I was going to hurl and if I started hurling, others would join me, and the theater would become a barf-a-thon and then… well, then what? Then I would be embarrassed.

And that’s what the movie is about.

In any event, I’ll assume that some more people fell down in funny ways and that some more guys put things in their butts, and that it was photographed very expensively and well.

But I do understand, at least, the legacy of this franchise. For one rare exciting moment in the history of the Cinema Industrial Complex, the box office and the artistic merit are aligned! Picture it: an important sociological documentary makes tens of millions at the box office. A testament to our time. This is what we were afraid of or afraid of being or afraid of being seen noticing: scorpions and farting and getting old and little people and fat people and being naked and, most of all, taking a tumble and crapping our pants, while everyone laughs at us.

Given my degenerate lifestyle-a fairly obvious subconscious attempt to do myself harm by stealth-it is almost inevitable that I will wind up in a hospital at some point, probably soon. If anyone out there somehow manages to oversee it, do me a favor and make sure it’s one of the types that serves booze. I’ll be ever so grateful.

by Awl Staff

Alice Gregory came from out west and ended up here in the east a few years ago now. After college at Bard, she now lives in New York City, among all those many people. She’s an advocate of intimate letter-writing in the modern world, and here explains why correspondence in all its forms is good for the soul.

The Awl: Where did you come from?

Alice Gregory: So originally, I’m from Marin County, which is basically just Bobos in Paradise. Broke hippies living in $3-million houses without foundations, soccer moms with slate showers, billionaire inventors.

The Awl: So best. And then there’s Marin City: home of Tupac.

Alice Gregory: He went to my high school.

The Awl: Get out!

Alice Gregory: But only for a semester so he’s not in the yearbook.

The Awl: That is so sad. Did you like high school??

Alice Gregory: I did like high school. It was a good place for low stakes self-mythologizing. Caring enough about what people think of you to try but not enough to not basically just do whatever you want.

The Awl: Oh. That’s a good way to put that experience! And then you came to New York City, where I greatly enjoy your Tumblr — in part because I recently as well had the revelation about club soda and seltzer (AND argued about it with someone) and I’m still upset about the differing-levels-of-sodium issue.

Alice Gregory: Sucks, right? I thought we had something there.

The Awl: What do you like most to do, to make?

Alice Gregory: Well, I find myself writing about art kind of often and that passive construction is totally intentional. I’m surrounded by it all the time. It is odd to be immersed in something that seems to draw people in, in an all-encompassing, self-identifying kind of way — and to not have that reaction is funny. Hobby-wise, I’m really basic: I read, I write, and I walk around listening to podcasts. I have a few people with whom I exchange exquisite emails, that’s also important.

The Awl: Oh, you have an interest in correspondence! The dyingest art form!

Alice Gregory: Oh yeah, the Hawthorne/Melville letters are my foundational text.

The Awl: Get out!

Alice Gregory: That’s the best part of New York (some might argue it’s the worst)-there’s no need for an imaginary audience; you really can be friends with and see on a weekly basis the people you “write for” if you wanna. Not ALL of them, but a lot are here.

The Awl: I think that’s what film and TV people say about LA too. Which sounds nice. I hadn’t thought about this before! But it’s so true that in book publishing and in blog publishing, you’re not talking about a *huge* number of readers. If 2000 people read your blog/book/blog-book, that’s fantastic! And they’re maybe near you. Then you can have them over for brunch too.

Alice Gregory: For me it’s just knowing they’re around. Honestly, I would rather gchat/email them usually than actually hang.

The Awl: So your life stays pretty epistolary.

Alice Gregory: I think maintaining effortful email correspondences is also crucial if you have an office job. To feel as though not only do you have multiple, very human projects going on but that you are vastly improving each others’ daily lives. It’s hard for me to sympathize sometimes with the notion that technology is destroying this kind of literacy we’re talking about-attention span, yes, but I write with the people I most care about much more than I would without email, and the exchanges are not trivial at all.

The Awl: That’s right! And it’s also so easy to incorporate new correspondents into one’s life. For instance, now we’ve randomly met and we might even exchange emails some day!

Alice Gregory: Yes! I hope so.

“The Smartest Thing She Ever Said” is a Tumblr based digital storytelling art project featuring four teams of two-one artist and one story editor-between now and the end of the year. For three weeks each, the teams were asked to interpret the phrase, “The Smartest Thing She’s Ever Said.” The current team features photographer Amanda Merton and writer Alice Gregory with support from project curator Alexis Hyde. ArtSheSaid.com and its artists are entirely supported by Ann Taylor in collaboration with Flavorpill.