It’s amazing anyone looked up from their phone and noticed.

I have shared this story before, but several summers ago, back in the bygone days when the L still traveled between Manhattan and Brooklyn, I was headed into town when we pulled up at the Bedford Avenue stop and a woman, whose entire outfit down to the boots was completely white, stepped onto the train. Oh, also her skin was sprayed with white paint and her face was fully whited up. It was the middle of summer and the car’s air conditioning was weak, and as White Woman approached the pole I was holding on to, my only thought was, “Oh, fuck, is this lady gonna sweat white paint on me?” (Reader, she did not.)

It was only later, when I was safely back in town, that I thought, “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU that you can stand next to a woman who is head-to-toe white and the only thing you wonder about is whether or not some of it is going to get on you?” But this is the way we get around here in New York. You focus on what will move you along as quickly as possible and how any anomalies will affect you. So I have to say that if I got on a train where a knife-wielding clown was blocking one of the exits, I would probably just move to another door to get off and then yell at myself later for forgetting to refill my MetroCard as I exited the station. Hey, you know what I’ve always wondered? Why don’t they have MetroCard machines on the platform? It is the one time during your travels where you can be sure that adding value to your card will not cause you to miss a train. It seems like the most sensible solution to the issue, and if you tell me, well, they don’t want to have it down on the platform where there’s no one to help you if things go wrong I will say, how many people do you notice in the stations above these days offering assistance, and also mind your own business, I wasn’t talking to you. Anyway, where was I? Oh, right, I guess there was a clown on a train? BFD. Call me when there are six clowns, and they start off by saying, “It’s showtime, ladies and gentlemen!” That’s when I’ll pay attention.

A Poem by Lynn Schmeidler

Goodbye Letter to the Medusa That Was My BFF

Sister monster, I can’t believe you’re leaving me
to binge on gluten-free biscotti and TV alone.
Escape is in your nature, and you taught me to be better
than the stethoscope at tracking down animal sounds.

They say when foxes eat the last gold grape you’ll
be decapitated and a winged horse and a golden giant
will spring from your neck — I say, when you’re headless
and the last white antelope is killed, I’ll store the sting

of your stares in my purse. I shall stop fighting and escape
too, O guardian protectress, in boots and bloodshot dress
into a little house I’ll build in the snake-charmed strip mall
where we swiped hot pepper lip plumper — remember

Cupid’s bow. But first, I’ll shrink to fairy size and nuzzle
the head of your memory. With a talent for recognizing
the piercable, combined with a whisper no one understands,
you were the best bad influence a girl could ever want.

Men behind easels making blind moons of all your eyes
couldn’t tell a good hair day from a knot of vipers. They call
you hideous, but I admire your way with oglers, the fatal
and muddy roads of all your hands to yourself deterrents.

As far as I’m concerned you’ll look great as just a head,
and your Red Sea coral will be the epitome of diversity.
I’m having the life of my time, you graffitied on my sleeping
bag, And you may grope for me in vain. When they broke us

up, my dyslexia kicked in, so she from me became me for she.
Now I see you everywhere, in hollows under the mangrove root
and in every ardent roadside attraction. We were such a good
public service message and we inspired originality — 

a helicopter made of claws, a Humvee made from lovers — 
teeth and wheels and everything. I’ll miss your grim
terribleness, the wide-stepping breadth it gave me,
or where, in apple-scented rain, your wavy locks became

artillery. We even flew a hot air balloon on the fire
of your fury. The silver wasp-nests hang like fruit
in honor of your badass. Your brazen hands were
my example. With the help of your stony gaze, I slew.

Note: italics are the lines of “Escape” by Elinor Wylie

Lynn Schmeidler’s poems appear in numerous anthologies and magazines including Boston Review and Fence. Her chapbook, Curiouser & Curiouser, a collection of poems based on rare neurological disorders, won the 2013 Grayson Books Chapbook Contest.

The Poetry Section is edited by Mark Bibbins.

What comes through your windows at night?

Have you started sleeping with the windows open yet? I’m glad the weather is nice enough that we’re able to do it now, but it has definitely messed with my slumber patterns. I toss and turn, and the dreams are CRAZY. I’m sure it has something to do with the barometric pressure or whatever. Last night was particularly strange: I had a dream it all would be okay, and for the first time I recall in years I woke up ready to take on the day. It took a few minutes until the fears and worries and anxieties crept back, before I resumed the wishing I was dead, but there it was, and so I shifted tack from “Yes I can!” to “I’ll just stay in bed.” It’s nice sometimes to think things might work out, but really that’s just not what life’s about.

Hey, here is something that is described as “experimenting at the confluence of jazz, modern classical, and electronic music,” but don’t let that scare you off, it’s very nice. Maybe a little ominous, but, you know, what isn’t these days? Enjoy.

★★★★★ The dim morning made it easy to linger sick in bed, but it broke apart into an afternoon so insistently sunny it was necessary to get out. Breeze bustled among the people bustling along the street. The sun coming through the travertine verticals on the side of the opera house left regular slashes of brightness on the irregular top shoots of the trees in the manmade grove beside it. The sounds of footsteps and bits of conversation carried distinctly. An immaculate-looking spaniel, black and lustrous white, passed through a sidewalk detour full of reflected light. Everywhere there was something more interesting to look at than the phone. Even the children pulled themselves away from the screens and went down to the forecourt with scooters. The dome of the older boy’s dull silver-gray helmet was filled with the colors of the sky and the sunlit world.

The stories behind our password hints

It’s weird that when an online password escapes you, the last line of digital safety is your high school’s politically incorrect mascot or the name your mother was forced to abandon because of patriarchal tradition. But if security questions are good for another thing—stories. So I asked people to tell me theirs.

One friend told me about her first concert (Third Eye Blind) where a crowd surfer landed on top of her. An old boss told me she didn’t actually have a childhood hero, adding “maybe that’s my problem?” One acquaintance told me that, coming from an immigrant family, a lot of these questions didn’t really apply.

I dug into this thinking I would be fascinated by the security questions people could and did answer. But it was the ones they couldn’t or wouldn’t that struck me. These questions are testing if we’re who we say we are, if we’re human, if our memories are precise enough to be reliable, and the answer is often, “maybe.” But maybe is not a sufficient answer for Chase Bank’s security algorithms. How do you remember how to remember your passwords?

Will Thwaites is a filmmaker, audio producer, and host of the podcast Nouns.

Why the Fuck Would I Waste My Time Reading Literary Fiction If It’s Not Going To Give Me An Edge In The Mental Cognition Game?

Like, who gives a shit about your imagined journey to self-realization in our consumerist age? Make me more empathetic or go back to Iowa, asshole.

Does reading literary fiction make you better able to understand other people? Of course not. It’s an idea so stupid that even those who actually enjoy reading books about writers in Brooklyn trying to understand what it means to be a writer — and a human being — in Brooklyn would probably find it a little suspicious, and yet it’s something we have been hearing repeatedly for the last few years, ever since a study showed that exposure to literature of that type helped improve theory of mind (“the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc. — to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own”).

Well, I hope you’re sitting down, because, like every other psychological study these days, that study turns out to be irreproducible bullshit.

“Literary fiction did not do any better than popular fiction, expository non-fiction, and not any better than reading nothing at all” at boosting cognition, according to Dr. Deena Weisberg, a senior fellow in Penn’s psychology department in the School of Arts & Sciences, who reran the experiment and found that, guess what, spending hours of your spare time plowing through some dense and symbol-laden carnival of affectation and ambiguity only makes you resentful of the publishing industry that pushed the book on you in the first place. What it doesn’t do is give you any additional insight into the human condition, because writers are, for the most part and deservedly so, shut-ins whose experience is mainly drawn from their own desperate imaginations of what other people are like. Maybe you’ll learn a little bit more about the kind of person who is driven to write literary fiction, but why the fuck you would want to know or even spend a second in the presence of a person like that is a mystery that Science will never solve no matter how many advances in the field occur.

Even though this idiot idea was always as unlikely to be true as anyone who ever thought about it for more than two seconds would have realized, Dr. Weisberg still holds out hope for those of you who have lost years of your lives reading the ponderous pages of soul-searching prose purveyed by the wide variety of alabaster Jonathans our age offers up as interpreters of the current climate. “[P]erhaps a protracted engagement with fictional stories such that you boost your skills, perhaps that could” improve your abilities in the area of empathy, she offers weakly. But why would you even want to? You know what people are like already. Perhaps you could just chuck all the books and watch TV to your heart’s content. Everyone’s saying it’s the new literature, and all you have to do is sit on your ass to absorb it. You can even eat while you’re watching it! Try that with a book! You know what? Fuck books. What have they ever done for you?

Mmm! Java!

Did you hear? A television program was giving away free coffee today.

Netflix temporarily turned a bunch of storefronts in the U.S. and Canada into pop-up Luke’s diners to promote their new season of “Gilmore Girls.” So from 7 a.m. to noon, the first 300 people who showed up to those locations got a free cup of coffee authentically branded with Luke’s logos.

I learned about the promotion the other day, when my buddy Marina sent me a link to the announcement, remembering that I’d watched the show for the first time along with her and a lot of my coworkers when it dropped on Netflix a couple years ago. My relationship with the program during that viewing experience could be best described as… tenuous.

For one thing, the characters are forever saying, “I just want to talk,” to people while they’re in the middle of having a conversation with them.

“Let’s just talk.”

“We need to talk.”

It’s hard to explain, but something about the show’s linguistics was like having poop smeared on the front of my shirt by someone who was smiling and maintaining eye contact with me the whole time. Brazenly bad.

And yet I watched the whole thing! Like a good consumer! Pissed off and comfortable and Instagramming between bites of whatever bad after-work dinner I’d thrown together. Let’s say spaghetti.

God did I not like these characters. And god did I not have the wherewithal to replace them with something else. Better to sit in this one, tepid bath than go through the hassle of getting out and filling the tub with new water, right?

Who knows.

Anyway, I woke up this morning and saw that today was the big day. I went into my texts, re-clicked the link Marina had sent me, and—lo! One of the locations was a mere ten-minute walk from my door.

I decided to get the TV coffee.

The Brooklyn location I went to wasn’t full of many deal-knowers, at least to my eye. It mostly looked like regulars in there enjoying their morning routines, and then me and a clutch of women outside, standing in a semicircle, taking turns snapping photos with the storefront sign.

Inside the coffee shop itself, a cardboard cutout of Luke greeted you with regional humor. As a Brooklyn-living javahead, it was important for me not to have a man bun or wear my headphones. I was, in fact, wearing headphones, but I left them on. Suck it, Luke.

Telling the barista, “I’m here for the Netflix coffee!” got me one cup that I’d call a medium. For free! It tasted good and normal. My formal review of the drink would be: There it was!

The coffee cup was a really complex piece of paper art. Just when I thought I’d experienced everything, it’d reveal some new facet of piping hot content for me to engage with. I noticed the Luke’s logo on the cardboard sleeve immediately, but by the time I was on my doorstep, I’d discovered a hidden Snap QR code. Back at my apartment, I noticed the quote from certified javahead Lorelai Gilmore in that iconic not-quite-Papyrus, not-quite-Garamond font. I would like to send +10 respect to whoever designed the shit out of this cup. I hope you got one million Netflix dollars.

If you let your camera hover over the QR code with Snapchat open, it unlocks a custom Luke’s filter that you get to use for exactly one hour. Here I have chosen to pair it with the ho filter a.k.a. the dog that gives you good skin, but the sky is truly the limit possibilities-wise.

And that was it!

Overall, we really cannot ask for more from a television program. The characters love coffee, I got a free coffee, and you know what, fam? I’m probably going to watch the entire four-part event when it drops November 25. The joke is truly on me.

Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.

The definition of “back catalog” is: “at least 18 months old, have fallen below №100 on the Billboard 200 and do not have an active single on our radio.”

My Chemical Romance is celebrating a tenth anniversary reissue of The Black Parade and it just FLEW off the shelves. They sold 16,906 copies of it last week. I dunno how loyally you’ve been reading this column but we haven’t seen numbers like that since Prince died or My Morning Jacket sold seventeen-thousand copies for still-unclear (to me) reasons. It’s like three times more copies than any of the previous number ones from the last month or two! Also, Disturbed re-emerged as a band and are playing Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City on October 7, so of course they sold a bunch of copies of Sickness.

Speaking of scary clowns, Margot Robbie recently revealed that she is a huge metal fan and went to a Slipknot show, so maybe that’s why they sold a bunch of copies of their self-titled album? Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage was reissued last week so both the deluxe edition and the original version sold a couple thousand copies (slightly more people opted for the deluxe). What’s going on with Pink Floyd, though? The first three Google results were about Pompeii, Corey Feldman, and Donald Trump—so you tell me! Apparently Apple is moving its UK headquarters to the Battersea power station in South London that has famously appeared in a lot of PF paraphernalia.

Finally, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen are duking it out the way New York and New Jersey always have and always will.

1. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE BLACK PARADE,THE 16,906 copies

2. DISTURBED SICKNESS 6,158 copies

9. SLIPKNOT SLIPKNOT 3,192 copies

10. JOEL*BILLY THE HITS 3,029 copies

11. SPRINGSTEEN*BRUCE GREATEST HITS 2,952 copies

20. FLEETWOOD MAC MIRAGE (DELUXE) 2,269 copies

25. FLEETWOOD MAC MIRAGE 2,128 copies

28. PINK FLOYD MEDDLE 1,977 copies

108. PINK FLOYD ATOM HEART MOTHER 1,127 copies

113. PINK FLOYD OBSCURED BY CLOUDS 1,111 copies

(Previously.)

It’s not all bad news out there.

Remember seven years ago when the New York Times wondered if gay guys and straight guys could really be friends? It turns out that they can, at least if pop culture and the people connected to Times reporters are any guide. I’m very proud of you, America. Everything else may be turning to shit but at least gay guys and straight guys can watch it all fall apart together, talking about what they most want to stick their dicks into next in a spirit of brotherly camaraderie.

Okay, music. Here’s another one from the terrific new Lambchop record FLOTUS, out November 4.

Did you catch “The Hustle,” the previous release from the album? Well here it as the soundtrack to Bill Morrison’s The Dockworker’s Dream. Now you have two things to enjoy this morning.

★★★ Late in a heavy gray morning, an unfamiliar blue appeared in the sky. The cords of the blinds cast shadows on the floor. The gray closed over again, yielded, then came partway back. By midafternoon the day was fully bright and the humidity merely softened the air and left a glow floating down the open half-mile of Broadway to Columbus Circle. The air and the light grew clearer, till a rich, clean gold suffused the whole approach of evening, and vivid pink traced the bottoms of the clouds.