At a restaurant recently I couldn’t help but overhear four women at a nearby table discussing their strategies for making it through this winter without succumbing to depression. They all had carefully-crafted plans that drew on their experiences with the previous two periods of never-ending dusk and cold that we endured here in town, and the way they encouraged each other and made approving noises in support of their table-mates’ strategies made me smile and feel good about people and ever so briefly forget the sad, inviolable truth: If you are here for winter you will be depressed. There is no escaping the feeling of emptiness and sorrow that the gloom and chill of late January bring. When winter descends you will despair, and even the best-drawn blueprints of October will come to nothing once those endless days of darkness settle in. Hold your memories of summer close, because they are all you will have left to warm you soon, not that it will be anywhere near enough. Via Pitchfork, here’s the new one from Dev Hynes. Enjoy.

★★★★ An acorn, fallen from a street tree’s branches to the unyielding paving bricks, crunched underfoot. The air in the subway was too hot for a jacket over a sweater, and it took a block-long walk in the chilly topside air to dispel the aftereffects. The climate control in the office had finally found a stable and seasonable setting. Color was out of the pedestrians, bundled in dark clothes at midday, and color was spreading in the trees. Over Union Square, the dome of a mature treetop was as bright as taxicab paint. In the cross street uptown, the yellow of the honey locusts tinted the evening light.

by Malcolm Harris

If you visit collegedebt.com, that’s exactly what you find. It’s a stark display, black on white, with an ominous ticker counting up. “Current student loan debt in the United States.” Right now it’s at $1.339 trillion, but by the time you read this, the sum will be larger. The site is owned and operated by self-styled maverick billionaire Mark Cuban, who uses it to drive home a point he makes whenever the media will listen: American higher education is overpriced, and the bubble is going to pop.

Higher education has been pegged as the next bubble since the 2008 housing crisis, and the evidence is compelling. Increases to university tuition and fees outpaced both pre-crisis housing prices and climbing healthcare costs. The growth over the last 35 years certainly looks unsustainable when you plot it on a graph, and America remembers what happens when an asset bubble collapses. But it’s been seven years since the housing crisis, and while new home prices dipped, tuition and fees haven’t really. College costs have sustained more public scrutiny — the cure for bubbles — than real estate ever did before the crash, and still no pop. The average undergraduate now takes out $30,000 in loans. Universities keep expanding, building new facilities and introducing all sorts of auxiliary services. Despite omens to the contrary, the higher education industry is going strong. Analysts are waiting for the bubble to pop; this is the story of why it won’t.

The real estate bubble was able to expand because lenders assumed that prices would increase indefinitely. After all, God isn’t making any more land; scarcity is built into the asset class. As long as prices kept growing, it didn’t matter much if buyers could really afford the houses they wanted. If owners defaulted, then the banks would take possession of a property whose value had increased since the original sale. It was a no-lose proposition, and in our advanced market culture, firms will pursue no-lose propositions to and beyond the full extent of the law. Banks hedged their loans by making more loans in different regional markets, protecting themselves from everything except a simultaneous nationwide deflation in housing prices.

Of course, simultaneous nationwide deflation in housing prices is exactly what happened. As homeowners found themselves owing more on their properties than they were worth, they defaulted. The robust housing market was gone in the blink of an eye, and lenders were stuck holding the bag — at least until they passed it to the taxpayers. Bailouts stopped the bleeding, home prices recovered, and now they’re growing again, albeit with moderated exuberance. It was a close call for the American economy, and neither lenders nor borrowers are looking to repeat the mistake.

But money managers are always trying to get their risk down to zero on paper. Zero risk means free money, and everyone likes free money. When it came to student lending, the federal government was happy to help. With the Higher Education Act of 1965, Congress created the Federal Family Education Loan Program. The FFELP made lending to a high-risk population as risk-free as possible. Under the program, private firms still lent their capital, but they were subsidized and backed by the Treasury, and in the event of defaults, the government promised to pay up with interest. It was an irresistible deal for commercial lenders, which was the plan. Providing credit for college students while they expanded their minds was deemed in the public interest.

At the initiation of the FFELP, total tuition, fees, room, and board at public four-year universities averaged $950, $1907 at private. It wasn’t nothing, but a summer job made it manageable for independent young people. The largest cost for prospective college students in 1965 wasn’t tuition — it was not working. There were jobs for high school graduates, and the wage premium for the college educated was less than half of what it is now. With a mere $1000 annual advantage for workers with degrees (in 1965 dollars), it would take them a long time post-graduation to make up for $17,000 in pay foregone over four years in school. There simply did not exist, at the time, the same near-term financial incentives for young Americans to attend college. Cheap credit just for being a student was a national policy meant to pull more people into school, and it worked.

Job training outside primary and secondary school had been in the purview of employers, who were forced to pay for the development whatever skilled labor they needed. But competing against the Soviet Union, American economists and policymakers became concerned with the condition of the national “human capital stock.” Without a push from the government, private incentives alone might not produce the world’s most advanced labor force. Between 1965 and 1975, the number of enrolled students doubled, from six to 12 million. It was a huge national investment in the future of labor, by the government, by commercial lenders, by families, and not least of all, by students themselves.

This influx of new college students was not a bubble, and most of them had no cause to regret their decision to attend. The gap in wellbeing between graduates and other workers was growing rapidly, and forward-thinking young Americans didn’t want to be left behind. Enrollment increased steadily, but in the early eighties, higher education tuition, expenditures, and loans started inflating in a bubbly manner. In the decade between 1971 and 1981, tuition at public and private colleges actually decreased by a small amount when adjusted for inflation, but in the decade that followed, it increased 60 percent at private schools and 56 percent at public colleges. Under the FFELP, private lenders and the government worked together to ensure that regardless of these costs, more and more students could still afford to go to college. The whole machine continued to hum along according to plan. Workers got educated, lenders made profit, GDP increased, America remained competitive.

But by the late eighties, some conservatives worried that the government had inadvertently created a complex system of price mismanagement. In a 1987 op-ed for the New York Times called “Our Greedy Colleges,” Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education William J. Bennett advanced the idea that universities were raising prices because they were over-subsidized. If the government offered more grants and loans, then schools would feel safe raising fees without having to worry about pricing out too many students. As long as enough well-qualified applicants could still manage the cost, colleges would use the additional revenue to expand and compete with other schools for market position and prestige. This idea became known as the “Bennett Hypothesis.”

As a small-government conservative, Bennett didn’t think the taxpayers should be in the business of increasing higher education access, but Americans disagreed; annual federal support to undergraduate students (grants and loans) swelled from $42 billion in 1990 to $194 billion in 2010. (table 3a) The feds also encouraged corporations and wealthy individuals to collaborate with universities in the form of tax breaks and incentives. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 allowed universities to begin patenting ideas that result from government research grants. Nurtured by a trough of easy credit borrowed by other people, American universities grew and grew. Expenditures rapidly outpaced enrollment: Public and private schools spent a combined $275 billion in 1990 (in 2012 dollars), which nearly doubled to $500 billion by 2012.

The growth in college spending and debt over the past 25 years triggers the bubble alert. There is no clear reason why educating people should have become that much more expensive. The market mechanism for the allocation of human capital seems to have gone haywire. Everything associated with college has seen its costs rise: Textbooks, like books in general, should be facing price competition from e-books, but between 1998 and 2014, the cost of textbooks rose 161 percent, 115 points above the Consumer Price Index and 162 percent above recreational books. Higher education costs of all sorts are responding to their own set of market pressures, forces divorced from regular inflation.

If you walk around an average American university campus, it’s easy to see where some of the money is going. Colleges are nice. That’s a change that, for many of them, has happened recently. Universities complete and begin $20 billion a year in construction, and 60 percent of it is for new buildings. Not only are schools always working on new facilities, the median cost per square foot on these projects has skyrocketed: Tripling between 1997 and 2012 for academic and science buildings, quintupling for residential halls. It’s the way institutions spend when money is not an obstacle, when the cash they’re shelling out belongs to other people. But at the end of the day, the money has to come from somewhere.

In the 2013–2014 school year, the typical out-of-pocket higher education cost was about $14,000. Few students and families can pay for college without loans — even the typical high-income family took out $5000 in education debt. Still, two-thirds of costs are paid at the time they’re incurred. Parents at all income levels dedicate thousands of dollars a year to college education, and so do the students themselves With 20 million college students, the yearly family, friends, and student cash contribution to higher education is around $200 billion, which is equivalent to the gross domestic product of Algeria. This is real money — a lot of money — that Americans have already labored for.

Despite their nation-sized collective offering, most students and their families (about 80 percent) are not able to pay the full price for higher education upfront. Seventy percent of students will graduate with debt. Under the FFELP, these loans were made by commercial institutions, but there was no real reason for the government to go through middlemen lenders since the state was backing the contracts anyway. As a cost-saving measure included in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the Treasury cut out the private firms and assumed direct responsibility for the vast majority of student lending. The government nationalized the student loan industry, but no one much noticed.

When Congress agreed to phase out the FFELP to help offset the costs of Obamacare — a good way to keep Republicans from arguing — the commercial lenders disappeared, as did much of the market for Student Loan Asset Backed Securities. The private industry vanished more or less overnight. And when the Department of Education woke up alone, they found themselves surrounded by billions and billions of dollars.

The thing about student lending is that it’s profitable, especially for the Treasury, which borrows as much money as it wants at virtually no cost. In the three years between 2012 and 2014, the Department of Education’s loan program pulled in $107 billion in profit, putting it right between Apple and Exxon as the second-highest earning US firm.

This means that as fast as the Treasury is originating loans ($107 billion in 2015), borrowers are paying them back faster. Yet the outstanding total keeps growing. This phenomenon should be familiar to anyone born this side of 1545, when Henry VIII legalized interest-bearing loans. Undergraduate borrowers in 2015 will face 4.29 percent interest. If a borrower took out $30,000 and paid it back promptly at $307.89 a month over the standard 10-year period, they would end up paying a total of $36,946.40, a solid return for the government. And that’s if they’re prompt — borrowers who take longer pay more as interest piles up. Do that 40 million times a year, and student lending turns out to be a very lucrative business.

Why, if student lending is such a profitable industry, did the private banks cede their market share without a fight? When a teenager starts borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for school, they don’t necessarily have any collateral that the lender can repossess. If you lend someone money for a car or a business, there’s a car or a business to seize. But human capital is inalienable. No lender can repo your sociological methods course, or even your diploma (at least not yet, though the technology is imaginable). This led the architects of the Higher Education Act to worry. What if someone were to take out a full basket of medical school debt, declare bankruptcy at graduation, and enter the high-paying field debt-free? What if a million someones were to do it? As part of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, Congress made student loans non-dischargeable. Once you take out student debt, the law ensures you’re stuck with it.

The student loan system works very well if the government is doing the lending: The Treasury doesn’t have to balance its books; the state can wait indefinitely to be paid back without worrying about solvency. Just as importantly, the government collects with the power of the state. They make the law, and they can exempt themselves. Courts have held that, for example, that the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act doesn’t apply to agents of the federal government, leaving them free to collect debt unfairly. The Higher Education Act even allows the state to garnish borrowers’ wages and tax refunds. With total stability and exceptional collections capabilities, the government can ensure that no matter how big the higher education bubble gets, it won’t pop.

How do the pessimists imagine things will go wrong? Mark Cuban thinks that students will eventually refuse to take out increasingly sublime loans, which will force colleges to reduce prices beyond their abilities, leading them to implode. But so far, this decline in demand hasn’t happened. A college degree is still worth what colleges say they’re worth, and then some. The wage gap between college graduates and high school graduates was $17,500 a year in 2013. If schools and the state required/invited students to take out $60,000 or $120,000 in student debt, the demand would still probably be there, especially if schools are allowed to accept elite teens from all over the world and the federal government continues to extend loan-repayment periods.

Between loan repayments and tuition checks, Americans are spending around $325 billion annually on college education, not including debt or taxes. Even if the tuition rates decelerate, that count will increase. And yet, the system works. It works for the government and it works for employers and it works for universities and it works okay for most college graduates, at least compared to the alternative.

The truth is that, although the college wage premium has increased in the past three decades or so, it’s not because young graduates are on average better off. Between 1986 and 2013, their median real annual earnings increased by less than $800. But over the same period, for those with no college, real earnings dropped by $2,525. The economic choice this country poses to young people about higher education has stopped being about opportunity for wealth — now it’s about fear of poverty. Empirically, the latter is a more effective motivator. Whether or not this is an appropriate way to produce educated workers is, in theory, a question for our democracy.

Despite being apocalyptic, the Higher Education Bubble narrative is in some ways comforting. It takes away political questions like, “Why does a public university spend $150 million on an athletic complex?” or “How many hours of work should it cost someone to go to college?” and replaces them with practical ones like “What are the best precious metals to horde?” If there’s a bubble, then the giant pile of debt isn’t real; one of these days it’s going to disappear. The unknowable disaster is preferable because the problem will, one way or another, solve itself. But it won’t, because there is no problem. Instead, there is a system that reliably turns future labor into spending today, and at an interest rate pegged above government borrowing costs. If we had a bubble, we wouldn’t have to confront the fact that Americans have already sold and spent billions and billions of hours of their yet unrealized lives, and they’re going to have to pay.

The collegedebt.com ticker is at $1.342 trillion now. At the median wage for young college graduates that’s 60 billion hours, or 37.5 full-time weeks of labor per outstanding borrower. When you read this, it will be higher.

Photo by Catherine LaRocca

I was stuck in a CVS the other day waiting for the people in front of me to figure out how to use the self-serve scanners because that’s the only way you can make a purchase anymore and my general irritation with the state of things was only heightened by the fact that I was forced to endure an entire performance of 10cc’s “The Things We Do For Love,” a song which makes me sad because it always reminds me of the ’70s, America’s Saddest Decade, and also it is almost impossible to get out of your head for weeks after. It is an “earworm,” the science of which you can read about here if you’re so inclined. I only bring this up because of a fantastic tip someone posted in response to our recent bit about “Tom’s Diner,” which is that humming the “da da da da da da-da da, da da da da da da-da da” part of “Tom’s Diner” aloud is a nearly foolproof way to knock an earworm of your head. Having used this method in hopes of eradicating “The Things We Do For Love,” and its terrible memories of “Dance Fever” and Smokey and the Bandit and Star Wars trading cards and everything colored brown and green and all the terrible tiny heartbreaks of childhood, and finding it to be successful, I think it is important that I pass it along to you.

by Leah Finnegan

The mainstream press has remained leery of the multitalented harpist Joanna Newsom since her much-touted 2004 debut, despite consistent favorable reviews. It’s endlessly interesting to watch the press try to interpret Newsom, who is known for her acrobatic singing voice, operatic albums, and magisterial lyricism. She’s not what a woman musician is supposed to be — Taylor Swift? — and clearly it’s difficult for many of them parse a person like that. A recent New York Times profile pegged to the release of her fourth album, Divers, reads:

The untrained but deliberate squeaks and warbles in her voice and her pure disregard for established idioms — more like distance than active rejection — initially deceived some listeners into thinking she was a naïf, when in fact she’s a meticulous musical architect. (Emphasis mine.)

Who knew there was a brain under all that hair?

On a cold November night a few years ago, I saw Newsom in concert at Carnegie Hall. I had no prior exposure except a disdainful Times profile that asked if she was a wood sprite or a serious musician. My expectations were low. As a rule I do not typically enjoy live music unless it’s classical or opera (I know, I know). But I loved this concert, because it was immediately clear that Newsom is exceptionally good at what she does. It was eminent that she was a genius and I promptly bought all her records and listened to them for two years straight. It would seem reasonable that Newsom would be considered among the greatest living musicians. Her songs are intricate and complicated and beautiful, even when they seem simple; her work builds upon itself and becomes better and better with each album. So why were her critics, mostly men, so quick to reduce her, even while giving her favorable reviews?

I would argue that it’s very simple: Because she’s a woman. In the male critic world, music is like a sport, and women shouldn’t be able to play it. Men have certain standards of how music should be, and no woman musician could ever be as good as a man, according to men. And since Newsom is kind of kooky, and the Times reported that she went to a thing called Lark Camp, and she has a high voice, and plays the harp, she projects weakness, not strength, like, um, Mick Jagger? Her “weirdness” works against her, unlike Kanye West or Prince, who are applauded for their quirks and treated like precious adult babies.

Whenever certain male critics write about Newsom, you can be sure her voice will be mentioned in a condescending fashion. Newsom indeed has a distinct-sounding singing voice, as have many well-loved and extremely successful musicians past and present, including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Freddie Mercury, James Brown, Axl Rose, Robert Plant, Isaac Brock, Eddie Vedder, and Geddy Lee. These male critics often deign to unfortunate stereotypes to characterize Newsom’s voice. Writing in theTimes about Divers, Ben Ratliff described it: “The tone of her voice oscillates between goofy young-girl singsong and constricted old-woman crackle.” In a review of her 2010 opus, “Have One on Me” on Pitchfork, Mark Richardson described her voice as “squeaky.” Mike Powell of the Village Voice said that her voice is like “a brave little coo with intermittent breaks that sounded like air being let out from a balloon through pinched fingers.” On VanityFair.com, in an article titled “The Virile Man’s Guide to Liking Joanna Newsom,” Andrew Wagner wrote, “I’ve heard the voice described as everything from a ‘dying cat’ to a ‘prepubescent teen whining about the mall’… But it is different. It is unique. And in my book, that’s worth something.” Big of you, Andrew. (It’s likely safe to say that these men don’t mind twee male singing voices.)

But really, what is a musician’s voice if not distinctive? Isn’t that… good? Entire pieces have been written about the voices of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, so American and vital and wise in their manly scratchiness, like unshaved bristle and whiskey and dirt. Man voice make music good. Woman voice music bad: Too high. Too sharp. Too warbly. Sounds like birds, screams, mother. It speaks volumes that men always seem to love PJ Harvey, she of the deep timbre.

Male reviewers also compare her to other female artists to demean her further. The AV Club called her a “unique hybrid of Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone,” while on Pitchfork, Richardson equated her to Joni Mitchell: “Newsom can sound a fair bit like her with her more richly textured voice” (not really, but ok). He continued: “One significant difference between Newsom and Mitchell is that the latter, especially early in her career, was writing songs that would sound good on the radio. For better or worse, Newsom is not a pop singer — that’s just not what she does.” I suspect in Richardson’s view this is mostly for worse (“I don’t want to overstate this record’s accessibility,” he wrote of “Have One on Me.” But how can music be inaccessible? All you have to do is listen.) The Kate Bush and Bjork comparisons are endless, and one can safely infer that these reviewers enjoy her predecessors more. Most puzzlingly, a recent Fader piece compared Newsom and Joan Didion: “‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ Joan Didion, a smart Californian just like Newsom, once wrote.” Two white people with female anatomy from California, so they’re basically the same. The woman who produces peerless modern music is simply not allowed to stand on her own.

She’s also not even really allowed to make high art. Further on in that sad Vanity Fair piece, Andrew Wagner writes of Have One On Me:

“Does anyone really want three discs of Joanna Newsom? [Ed note: Her… fans?] Have One on Me is like listening to the Pride and Prejudice book-on-tape while driving on 1–94 through Indiana and Illinois with NPR’s Jonathan Schwartz riding shotgun. It’s long (3 discs!), sad, depressed, flat, antiquated, boring, and runs the risk of making you nod off at the wheel and die. All this against a beige backdrop flanked by decaying industrial towns. I mean, three discs?”

Some reviews of Divers are similarly, if subtly, dismissive of feminine art.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Newsom can still be a daunting listen, and Divers requires time and attention to fully embrace. Those who do invest in it will find an artist whose highly personal art is edging toward the universal.

The AV Club:

Newsom’s artistic lineage isn’t difficult to track. Centuries of English, Irish, and American folk music informed a modernist revival in the 1950s and ’60s spearheaded by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, before being taken up by Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Fairport Convention, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the aforementioned Joni Mitchell.

Remember, ladies: Behind every great women there are decades of greater men.

That this type of writing persists makes me think of what Chris Kraus said in I Love Dick, her novel-memoir about how men are terrible: “Who gets to speak and why… is the only question.” (The only answer is men.) Women’s stories, which, yes, tend to focus more on relationships, the domestic, family, will always be considered “sad, depressed, flat, antiquated” or worse, trivial, until this changes.

That’s just the way it is, and it can be seen clearly in the way men write about Newsom: that silly voice, a long album about the breakdown of a relationship? Boring! But Bob Dylan — now there’s a true unadulterated genius. (An aside: Artistic feminism only works if you’re a Beyonce feminist — feminism as marketable product, equally appealing to men and women. Feminism that sells. This is not Newsom’s feminism, which is not marketed to the masses.)

It deserves to be said that there are more critics today working against the mutedly anti-woman grain than when Newsom’s previous albums came out. Unsurprisingly, many of them are women. Laura Snapes, in Pitchfork, gives Divers a rave without comparing Newsom to another artist; she writes, rightly, that Newsom “is only her own yardstick.” In Entertainment Weekly, Melissa Maerz points out that “Newsom has been called an ‘outsider artist,’ though she’s actually a best-selling singer-songwriter and minor movie star [in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice].” This is progress.

Newsom, for what it’s worth, doesn’t seem prone to pulling a Liz Phair anytime soon. It’s good that she does whatever the fuck she wants, stays “true” to her art, doesn’t sell out to a huge label, and more or less ignores the haters — those whose tolerance for what they perceive as “feminine” or “flighty” is low. In an interview last week with NPR, Scott Simon asked Newsom about the stereotypes that haunt her:

Simon: If you kind of trace back the way in which your career has been written about over the years, early on you were often characterized as sort of an ethereal, whimsical girl of the woods. How do you feel about that now?

Newsom: Well, I do think that pretty much every person that makes music has some thing that he or she cannot shake, and doesn’t really relate to, and this is mine. So, I can’t complain too much. I do think that most of the people who actually like my music, and listen to it in any way other than a passing, casual listen — I think very few of those people are quite that reductive about me.

It does still bother me. It also is funny to me, because it takes enormous effort at this point to maintain that interpretation of the music. You have to ignore 90 percent of the lyrics!”

So really, most of the Newsom-reductiveness comes down to the fact that those doing the reducing are simply not listening to her. Not to stereotype men, but this does not surprise me.

Last week a friend and I went to see a movie at IFC. Before the film started they played the video for a single from Newsom’s new album. Her visage loomed large on the screen. “A woman is alive,” she sang. Two men sat next to us, chatting through the video and noisily eating popcorn. The song was very beautiful. As the video’s credits rolled, the men laughed. “Paul Thomas Anderson directed that piece of shit?” one said, incredulously.

Photo by LaVladina

“Every now and again you could see a coyote on a regular street. Sometimes the ground would shake and the phones would get jammed and you couldn’t ascertain if everyone you knew was okay because not everyone updated Facebook to say FELT IT. They told us we’d be drinking our own piss within the year thanks to drought conditions and I’d awake from dreams where I had become so dehydrated that I needed a water dropper applied to me to reduce the spongy cardboardness that my flesh had taken on as a result of rampant lack of drinking water.”
 — There’s other stuff here about some road in New Jersey or whatever but the best part of this piece from the ubiquitous Taffy Brodesser-Akner is this paragraph about how fucking frightening and terrible and generally garbagey Los Angeles is. One of the ways you can tell she’s a great writer is she doesn’t even have to get into its unparalleled status as a vapid and soulless and cynical city lacking in charm or taste or basic human grace; she is able to convey the essence of the horrible nightmare shithole that all right-minded people pity and despise in just three sentences about environmental circumstances.

Wild??? I’d say “MILD”. And to whichever guest benefitted from calling this misinformation into the Post, I only wish you good health, happiness, and a long life to enjoy taking advantage of the kindness of strangers and talking shit about others. #reallyqueen?

A photo posted by Marc Jacobs (@themarcjacobs) on Oct 26, 2015 at 9:23pm PDT

New York City’s last great local gossip item, the “Page Six Team”-bylined story “Marc Jacobs hosts a wild, 10-person orgy,” really delivers the goods right in the headline. Ten men! An orgy, it seems safe to say, is definitely an orgy if it contains double digits. But those are not the facts: The digits in this orgy were at minimum eleven, as the text clearly indicates that “the single designer hosted an orgy over the weekend with up to 10 people, whom he invited via Grindr.” Bless! That’s so much work on a little iPhone keyboard.

Where does an orgy stop and start? Two is a mating and three is a threeway. Because four is a fourgy, you would think that five is logically an orgy, but no, five is two couples who keep forgetting about the creepy guy cranking it in the corner. Six is an accident, you didn’t get enough for a gangbang but you got too many for something more innocent and lovely. Six is gross. Seven is probably a really mild semi-orgy, an afternoon tea time of group sex. Seven is your grandmother’s orgy, polite and manageable, with people ducking out for treats when winded. Eight is certainly enough to hide from someone with bad pheromones or gross genitalia. Nine, though: nine is when we create the bare underpinnings of an orgy. The gross orgy about to break out in Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress has ten at the table. Couture’s Romains de la décadenc has a whole passel, more than a dozen; a Tom of Finland orgy never has fewer than eleven. In the Dutch engravings for de Sade’s Juliette from 1789, each panel seems to get more and more participants, and sprinkled throughout are highly unlikely and McMartin preschool-style sky-high pileups, but it ends, as far as we can tell, with an even dozen. If you have twelve people of any gender, you always have an orgy. And if you can’t quite remember how many there were, you’re definitely on your way.

Coupled with an very lengthy premature obituary for the career of Marc Jacobs published over the weekend, the Post seems to be trying to tell the world that Jacobs is off the wagon and back on the sauce. (“Jacobs is reportedly sober,” goes the orgy item; he’s plagued by a “mystery” goes the obit.) Like a trial lawyer, whenever the Post refers to a mystery, they always have an answer at hand.

Jacobs doesn’t address that text, and also doesn’t do himself any favors by aggressively clapping back to both items on Instagram. But would you have the willpower to resist? I certainly wouldn’t. Defensiveness never plays, but it does get you a million comments, most of which involve some variation of “yaassss” and “slayyyy” and various nail-painting + praise-hands emoji stringlets. Do those folks buy handbags? I’d say they do not. Still, lots of people think if you live like a diva you somehow won’t also die alone and afraid and regretful in a cold bathroom with a needle in your arm.

An open letter to MAUREEN CALLAHAN Girl, I think I understand your pain. You’re a sick woman. It must be such a sad, unfulfilling and lonely existence to get paid for “writing” (I use the term loosely) an article put together from out of context information “written” by other journalists over a period of time, for different periodicals, in different countries. I can’t even imagine your suffering having made a life and name working for what has to be the worlds worst, trashiest, and most irresponsible of “newspapers” (LOL)! I can imagine the powerful and fulfilling feeling you must feel with each piece you “write” that helps yourself and your readers feel better about their lives by putting down others who are so fortunate as to have been blessed with a genuine passion for creation. Those creative individuals who like everyone else has feelings, a sexual appetite, “issues”, character defects, and professional ups and downs. If you were a real writer and not the parasite feeding off of the successes and failures of others I wouldn’t bother writing my thoughts here. I do feel sorry for you. Please know you are in my prayers. I hope you will someday find something, somewhere that gives you pleasure…and not at another’s expense. Should that moment happen for you, please don’t thank me. I only wish the best for everyone. Even you. Sincerely and disrespectfully, Marc (Jacobs). #lethimwhoiswithoutsincastthefirststone #youwannacomeforme?

A photo posted by Marc Jacobs (@themarcjacobs) on Oct 26, 2015 at 8:59pm PDT

I know how hard it is to even get out of bed most mornings so let me start you off on a positive note: We remain, for the next two days, more than four weeks away from Thanksgiving. You can still conceivably see that terrible holiday as something in the distant future instead of the looming locus of dread that will eventually consume your every sober thought and riddle your mind with anxiety and fear. Want to know something even more uplifting? Christmas is more than two months away! You could die before then! I’ll tell you, it’s tough to stay upbeat, but if you look hard enough there’s always a reason to smile. Enjoy.

★★★★ By smooth orderly degrees, without dramatics, the wholly wet and gray morning became a wholly sunny early afternoon. “It’s so warm outside, I don’t even need my hoodie,” the four-year-old announced, shrugging it off in the middle of the sidewalk, Q.E.D. There were puddles at the curbs, and one of the pumpkins from the rack outside the grocery had wet mud on it. The hand that cradled the pumpkin got muddy. Into what, though, had the tidy progress led? There was a dampness yet to the bright warmth — not misplaced spring, not the usual autumn, something unsettled. Up in the apartment again, the faint, keen sound of a trumpet drew the ear to the open window, through which the even fainter sounds of the rest of a brass band drifted. Whenever the apartment door opened, the breeze blew more freely in across the couch. The light grew clearer and stronger, and air currents began to croon in the depths of the building. Outside now a chill was coming on but the four-year-old’s blood was up; he went spinning up the street, still without a jacket, in the rising wind.

The older I get the more certain I become that nothing will ever be as perfect and pure as Calvin and Hobbes was way back when. Can we do something decent just one time and not fuck it up by poisoning it with Internet? Please? I’d be ever so appreciative.