GOD. Can you BELIEVE the HACKS they put on this list of ten fiction writers 80 or older? It’s all NEPOTISM and FRIENDS OF FRIENDS. Paula Fox? OMG so expected. So 2006! And who did BEVERLY CLEARY SLEEP WITH TO GET ON THIS LIST? I can’t STAND IT! (Annnnd end sarcasm. No but seriously, people… omitting Ursula Le Guin? Hello? One of the greatest writers of our time of any age? I will kill you.)

No but seriously folks: would you like to go deep on Christopher Hitchens? I personally would not! I am not terribly interested. I am sitting this one out! However: “About any sufferings that cannot serve as a pretext for American military intervention, moreover, Hitchens appears to have stopped caring.”

For those reading about the remake of Red Dawn (and the brewing outrage over it in China!) in the Daily News or the Hollywood Reporter or the Global Times or Reuters or the New Yorker or elsewhere, Abe Sauer’s original piece on the film, with excerpts from the script, can be found here.

Alex Balk: Hey
Balk: Can you explain something to me?
Choire Sicha: DID YOU JUST “HEY” ME?
Balk: What exactly does “meow meow” signify?
Choire: asdlfkasdf;
Choire: That’s a complicated one
Choire: Because
Choire: “Meow!” means “CATTY!”
Choire: But MEOW MEOW MEOW
Choire: Or just MEOW MEOW
Choire: Means “LA LA FINGERS IN MY EARS I CAN’T HEAR YOU”
Balk: Okay, that’s what I was working with, but I just wanted to make sure.
Choire: Annnnd this is a blog post now.

by Abe Sauer

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Abe Sauer loves brands.

It’s not an emergency or anything, but Gucci Mane’s eyewear retainers are not going to be effective unless he wears them in the way they were designed to be worn. And those glasses look expensive.

I was quite struck by the headline “20 Young Writers Earn the Envy of Many Others,” which is how the New York Times announced the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of fiction writers last night. Two things: hooray, “under 40” is young now! I mean, “being in the first or early stage of life or growth”? Our culture has delayed adolescence so extraordinarily far that 39 is young! Fine by me, selfishly. But also: envy? Oh, no! No, no. No, my lambs!

There’s nothing to envy about being on a list. Absolutely, it’s quite understandable that a number of fiction writers have spent the last month or two in a state of extreme irritation-a number of people were encouraged to drop everything and produce new short fiction for review by the New Yorker. So, there are more than a couple agents getting yelled at right now! And the annoyance is understandable. But also: that’s business, folks. Part of “work” these days is writing things on spec, or for free, or as an audition. It often blows! Let’s woman up about it though.

Here’s a few things to remember today.

1. No one took anything away from you. ONLY YOU (and the state! And your children!) CAN TAKE THINGS AWAY FROM YOU.

2. Some people being “elevated” (dubious usage) or singled out doesn’t harm anyone else.

3. If you’re lucky, you’re like me, and impulses towards envy are motivational to you. I have a competitive streak and when someone shows some “success” (which, by the way, never feels much or for long like success when it’s you), that means it’s time to get to work.

4. Who wants to be on a list? I mean, first there were HUAC lists, and now this? No list ever comes to any good!

5. Besides, in five and ten years, annoying bloggers (are there any other kind?) are going to do the “look back” on this list and they’re going to be like “Oof, five of these writers were never heard from again and one drank himself to death and two got divorced hideously and wow, that one was sort of a flash in the pan!” Who wants to be subject to that?

6. You look really pretty today! I mean, probably not as pretty as Joe O’Neill, but he’s not on this list either, because he’s like, 45 or 46 now.

7. Some of the people on that list are, believe it or not, still poor. And probably have terrible, awful apartments. How many wonderfully too-long books of crazy alternative mixed-genre fiction do you think Chris Adrian has to write before he pays off his med school loans? I would estimate 6000 of them.

8. Maybe you should act out over this and start a revelatory blog! Or a fun Tumblr! Just think of how many more people would buy your books if they were reading your bloggings. (Nineteen? Twenty?)

9. We return again and again to the issues of “false leveling.” (This syndrome needs a better name! A catchier one.) But what happens is, someone gets some “attention,” and suddenly, in our monkey minds, they’re elevated from us. And sure, a list like this brings some cash. But, for starters, get your head out of the publishing bubble. Yes, the agents will be working this. But most of the payment these people will get is actually of the attention variety-within the publishing industry. So they’ll sell another book. Great! Still, you know what attention does for one, on a daily basis? NOT SO MUCH. Nothing, at least, that you can’t do without being on such a list. You know who doesn’t really care much? Actual book readers.

10. The New Yorker has a million subscribers. That’s great! And we wish it had even more! I am one! But, you know, eh, a million. Twice that many Americans are in jail. Sarah Brown’s Twitter has 1.12 million subscribers. (Who? Yes: Gordon Brown’s wife.) You, just like the New Yorker, could have a million subscribers by the end of the month, if you wanted to. So get cracking, buddy.

Nooo! No. According to People, RUE MCCLANAHAN has departed this terrible planet. From Starship Troopers to Murphy Brown to Murder She Wrote to Touched by an Angel, Ms. McClanahan was a hard-working woman, who never missed an opportunity to show up with a wink and an unparalleled repertory of great schtick. The Summer of Death 2™ is already a horrorshow.

Remember back when the financial crisis hit and John McCain was all, “We should suspend our presidential campaigns” and Barack Obama was like, “Look, presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time… Let’s not be jackasses about this,” and even some of the people who were McCain supporters were thinking, “You know what, dude totally has a point, especially with all the messes whoever wins is going to have to face.” Do you? I’m pretty sure I remember that. But it seems more and more like a dream.

If President Obama doesn’t make the oil spill in Louisiana his sole priority, goes the current conventional wisdom, he’s toast. Important foreign trips? Blow ’em off! Working on unemployment? Forget about it! Climate change bill? Climate change this. It’s got to be non-stop oil spill action, or else.

“This has hijacked his entire legislative agenda,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University who has written about Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was consumed by the Iran hostage crisis. “The White House felt they were on a roll. They were looking to be a new New Deal or new Great Society and they were just getting momentum going. Something this awful has sidetracked the agenda.”

Sara Taylor Fagen, White House political director under President George W. Bush, said the failure to contain the spill would make it hard for Mr. Obama to accomplish anything this year. “He’ll likely be managing the fallout for years to come,” she said. “Not until his re-election campaign will he have an opportunity to press reset.”

(Ah, yes, the Carter comparison. “When commentators start invoking Carter, that is very bad news indeed,” says Howard Kurtz. That may be so, but commentators have been invoking Carter since the primaries, at least. Until all the members of the commentariat who can remember the Carter administration die off, every Democratic president will have Carter invoked against him. It’s just the way things work. It happened to Clinton, it’s happening to Obama, it will happen to whoever comes next, assuming we don’t wind up voting for an endless string of Tea Party presidents until we finally nuke ourselves out of existence. You know when Democratic presidents stop getting Jimmy Cartered? When they get re-elected. So Obama’s got about another two years of this.)

Anyway, look: There is plenty to be angry about the way the oil spill has been handled. If it makes you feel better to have the President scream and shout and display anger, I can understand that. I’d actually prefer that he use this as an opportunity to reform our lax regulatory processes across the board-I was actually thinking that the first big disaster we’d face would have something to do with a nationwide outbreak of devastating food-borne illness, but I guess that’s why you never bet against oil-and focus the country on our need for cleaner and more sustainable resources, but I’m down with a show of anger if that will shut up the Maureen Dowds (remember when she called him Obambi? Now she wants him to be Mr. Emotional.) who are clamoring for a fit of rage. But it would be absolutely ludicrous if the administration were to stop all the other important work that needs to be done so that the President can show up in Louisiana and rip out Tony Hayward’s jugular with his teeth. (Satisfying, sure, but ludicrous.) The guy’s got a TON of stuff on his plate. Can we cut him a little slack and not pretend that he has to go in, Harrison Ford-style, and take care of it personally?

Presidents do have to handle more than one thing at a time. Let’s allow the guy to do that. (Although maybe hanging out with Paul McCartney and Jerry Seinfeld is one of those things that should be rescheduled. Just a thought.)

The between-the-lines reading of today’s Tom Friedman column: “Starving the people of Gaza is bad… because it’s bad for Israel. Not because the Gazans are starving (65% of the population is food insecure).”