But you’d be wrong.  Teddy Wayne has overcome his natural reticence to reveal himself as the heroic “Amtrak eavesdropper.”  In his article “Obsessed? You’re Not Alone,” he tells us that he overheard the “chatty” gals, started “[cataloguing] all the vernacular expressions they emphatically overused” (such as “‘they’re just jealous’”), and transcribed them to Facebook.  But he didn’t just notice that women be chattin’ and usin’ vernacular English.  No, he started thinking.   “The short phrase that so got my attention was ‘I’m obsessed.’”  It’s a phrase that is used, by ladies.  He notices that about it.  He asked around, and other people have noticed it, too!  Sofia Cavallo, “the online editor for the fashion retailer Opening Ceremony,” weighs in to point out that  she “‘[hears] it all the time,’” so it must be true.  Wayne has found that most precious of things:  An honest-to-God trend.

“When and why did this verb, which once connoted a serious psychological disorder, become hijacked by the fashionable young women (and a few men) of America?”  Yeah, a few men.  An odd number, if you know what I mean.  Odd as in queer.  Queer, as in fruitier than an Edible Arrangement sticking out of a glory hole.  And speaking of metaphors, when did the word “hijacked” become hijacked to connote the mere metaphorical or hyperbolic extension of a word to express related meanings?  Hijacking used to connote a serious crime; what’s more, it used to denote it, because that’s its literal meaning.  Now it’s being serial-murdered and eaten by linguistic Jeffrey Dahmers of colloquial language use.  Even cannibalism is being cannibalized to refer to things that imitate other things.  For shame.

If you’re like most of my readers, you’re probably an alcoholic humanities graduate student, and you’re thinking, “figurative language and hyperbole have existed in every known community since humans developed the capacity to use language; they are a defining feature of creativity and cultural change.”  Well, it’s easy for you to say that.  Sure, just sit on your sofa and point out something that’s totally obvious to anyone who’s familiar with the topic, and that you didn’t even need statistics to demonstrate.  While you’re bitching, Teddy “bestselling author” Wayne is putting in the legwork to do real journalism:  Interviewing young women to better understand their perspectives and let them explain in their own words why they communicate the way they do.  Just kidding, he did an internet search.   And what he found may shock you:  numbers and factoids.   “The word ‘obsessed,’ tracked by Google Ngram’s search in books, sees a sharp rise from 1900 to 1920, then a slow and steady increase to 2008.”  Hang on there!  Who cares about 2008; I think the real story is that mysterious sharp rise.  These were uses of the word “obsessed” all by itself, without the “I’m,” so one can only assume that people were accusing others of being obsessed with things — but what?  celluloid collar maintenance?  influenza avoidance techniques?  ocean liner sinkability?  trench redecoration?  stockpiling liquor “quick while it’s still legal”?  drawing unflattering caricatures of Kaiser Wilhelm?

As far as I can tell, people in the 1910′s spent like half their time doing this.

Yes, we could probably learn a lot from the vanished trends of a bygone era.  But they do possess one large drawback:  Not one of them has ever caused society to disintegrate into a dystopian hellscape of social media narcissism.  If trends aren’t threatening to destroy civilization, what’s the point of caring about them?

Perhaps for this reason, Wayne declines to give context or meaning for the historical data that he spent valuable seconds Googling.  Instead, he speeds through the decades.  “The phrase ‘I’m obsessed,’ however, is flat and low until the mid-’50s, after which it steeply ascends.”  Just like your mom’s love life  “The first instance of ‘I’m obsessed’ shows up in the New York Times archive in 1967.  There are four examples from that year…after that, they’re few and far between, with a five-year gap between 1980 and 1985, totaling just 19 by the end of that year.  It heats up a little after that, but remains sporadic, with just 98 total entries through 2007.”  Just like my love life A riveting narrative.  I especially liked the part where the thing remained flat and low before steeply ascending, then heated up for a while while also remaining sporadic.  A true triumph, if not of the human spirit, of the spirit of lines being used to represent the numerical fluctuations of abstract entities.   It’s the feel-neutral story of the year!  The hand of the master storyteller is evident in the way Wayne generates suspense about the fate of the line.  Maybe he should quit writing novels and go in for nonfiction, since he has such a talent for it.  Veer:  How Statistical Instances of Qualities or Occurrences Ascend, Descend, Fluctuate or Remain Static When Represented in Graphic Format.  Malcolm Gladwell is going to be so jealous, he’ll respond with Slice: The Manner in Which Proportional Segments of Pie Charts Look Like a Half-Circle, a Triangle, or Just a Skinny Little Line, Depending on What Percentage They Represent.  The Freakonomics guy will fire back with N:  The Untold Story of a Notational Symbol That Can Be Used in Mathematics to Represent Any Integer.

Yes, Wayne has stripped narrative to its very essence.  And like all narratives, this one features an action-packed climax near the end:  In this case, the triumphant 2008 rise of “I’m obsessed.”

“It’s now entrenched in our everyday informal language, most often employed by young women.”  Oh, these are young women doing this?  Why didn’t you say so before?  Because I feel like if people would just complain a little more often about the way young women speak, pronounce words and interact on social media, we could halt humanity’s slide into barbarity and chaos.   For instance, on “Instyle’s daily ‘We’re Obsessed!’ feature[,] one object of obsession [is] a $4000 Fendi bag.”  I gather that he disapproves of this, but dude, you’re writing for a publication that recommended readers spend $80 on a set of four nails, and use them “to hang a picture.”  You’re a few column inches away from someone telling me that a $1,870 blue glitter biker jacket will “become that jacket you can’t live without.”  At least the bag is cute.

I can live without that.

On Twitter, “a recent sampling of obsessions deemed worthy for public display: cream soda, cardigans, ketchup, one girl’s own eyes.”  To be fair, those people didn’t know their tweets were going to be summarized in the newspaper.  If they had know those words would become their most lasting contribution to posterity, perhaps they would have tweeted something more edifying.  “I’m obsessed with the importance of kids staying in school & saying no to drugs!  Don’t text and drive, kids!”  “These colorblock wedges are EVERYTHING… but so is preventing cervical cancer by getting a routine pap smear! #cancer #adorbs”

“One reason for the mainstreaming of ‘obsessed,’ in fact, may be the very mental malady with which we associate it.” Very lucid.  And one reason for the failure of this sentence to make any sense may, in fact, be the very rules of logic and syntax which are flouted by it.  Would that Wayne were as “obsessed” with the craft of English prose as Twitter users are with mundane condiments and beverages.

“Formerly a rare diagnosis, [obsessive-compulsive disorder] is ‘the obsessive disease of our time,’ says Lennard J. Davis, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of ‘Obsession: A History.’”  As so often when English professors give quotes for Times trend pieces, questions proliferate.  Are there even any other obsessive diseases besides OCD?  If it’s the only one, wouldn’t that make it, by default, the obsessive disorder of every time?  Or is Davis trying to say that people are “obsessed” with the very fact or possibility of suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and won’t shut up about it, like with food allergies?   Is anyone really out there bragging about how many times they had to tap the doorknob and spin in a circle before they were able to leave the house?  This is why I think English professors should stick to analyzing the phallogocentric ontology of desire in Paradise Lost, instead of turning disorders of organic brain function into “Hot or Not.”

“Saying ‘I’m obsessed with’ as opposed to ‘I love’ might also advertise the speaker’s intellectual heft, given its scholarly implications of philosophers and researchers being obsessed with problems.”  As a regular viewer of Youtube makeup tutorials and haul videos, let me just say:  I always knew those gals were up to something.  All this time, they’ve been trying to advertise their intellectual heft…and it worked!  Think about it:  When you hear a sorority girl chattering away about how she’s obsessed with Pinkberry, tanning beds, Pucci rain boots and Skinny Girl margaritas, your unconscious mind tells you she is a deeply erudite and intelligent person.  Then it gets totes jealous of her intellectual heft, and tells your conscious mind to hate her.  Your brain only makes you think she’s an airhead because it had to come up with a reason for disliking her so much.

Damn you, Piinksparkles!

This mental process is also why college men are so driven to procreate with those type of women.  It is a manifestation of their desire to find an intelligent mate who will be better able to survive the unforgiving hunter-gatherer environment.  I think Wayne should have interviewed an evolutionary biologist for this piece, as well as an English professor and the fashion retailer for Opening Ceremony.  He could have proven that this so-called “trend” is really a hard-wired biological imperative.

“…much as ‘random’ is most closely linked to the highbrow realm of statistical probability.”  And yet everyone’s so against having “randoms” show up at their party.  It just goes to show that the sciences aren’t truly respected in this country.

“I think the introduction of Calvin Klein’s Obsession fragrance, in 1985, and the risque ads and haunting commercial in 1993 featuring Kate Moss whispering the word over and over, helped bring it into lexical prominence.”  That has to be it!  Factoring in the obvious 23-year time lag between the introduction of the perfume in 1985 and the increased usage of “I’m obsessed” in 2008, it accounts for all the data.  Teddy Wayne should be a detective.  He’d be calling the chief of police, all like  “I’ve discovered the man behind the jewel heist.  This man confessed to shoplifting an ice cream sandwich when he was 8, thus bringing a pattern of larcenous actions into behavioral prominence.”

Those ads also brought teenage males’ penises into anatomical prominence.  ZING.

“That campaign, said Professor Davis, was ‘a perfect example’ of our culture ‘that’s geared to obsession.’”  Brilliant.  The success of a product called “Obsession” does indeed suggest the culture has an interest in obsession.  I can’t wait to hear what he says about Estée Lauder Beautiful (the perfect example of our culture that’s geared toward beauty), the Snuggie (the prototypical illustration of our culture that’s geared toward snugness) and the pocket pussy (the supreme instantiation of our culture that’s geared toward pussies that can fit in pockets).  Does this guy have tenure yet?  If not, they might want to consider witholding it until he can demonstrate that his powers of analysis extend beyond pointing out that a word’s meaning relates to the concept that it refers to.

If product names reflect the things that our society values, then how do you explain THIS?

Davis complains that “‘We think that things are not good unless we’re obsessed about them…If you’re only mildly interested in your partner, that’s not as hot as being obsessed about somebody.’”  Finally, someone willing to stick up for being only mildly interested in the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with.  “Contrary to our claims of obsession, Professor Davis believes that ‘the generation now is very low key — the emotions are flat — compared to movies from the ’50s, when people look sentimental.’”  As part of the generation now (or at least a generation now), I’d just like to say that we’re tired of being compared to actors in movies from the 50′s.  It’s really getting to be a sore subject with me and my co-generationists.  Just when we’re having a good cry on our Youtube channel over meatless Mondays or Justin Beiber’s cancer, someone from the “then” generation turns up to point out that we don’t look as distraught as Lauren Bacall did in Written on the Wind.  Leave me alone, gramps!  I’ve got my own fake life to live!

Anyway, having emotions is good, but only if you’re not trying to have them.  It’s like in Peter Pan, where Captain Hook says that “to have good form without knowing it…is, of course, the best form of all.”  We’re trapped in a phenomenological paradox wherein the only way to be authentically emotional is to be unaware of it, plus our tweets are inane.  Is their no end to our failures?

No, there’s not.  We’re also “inflat[ing] the language’”:   “‘We’re using this powerful word, but lowering the standards by having everybody be obsessed by everything.’”  If you understand economics, this makes perfect sense.  Inflating the language of emotions lowers the value of everyone’s emotional savings, unfairly punishing the emotionally responsible and discouraging emotional job creators (“sob creators”?).   People who spend 80 hours a week feeling things don’t want to see their earnings trickle away just because a bunch of freeloaders thought they deserved to get LOLs handed to them.  These emotional handouts (“affective entitlements”) are bankrupting us and saddling future generations with emotional debt.   What we need is a return to the emotional gold standard.  (The emotional gold standard stipulates that you can only smile on your wedding day, you can only cry if someone dies, and the only thing you can be “obsessed” with is actual gold.)

Is it ever okay to use the O-word?  Wayne’s next interviewee, a memoirist named James Lasdun, says that obsession is only good when you’re a scholar obsessed with a research subject.  In a strange non sequitor, Wayne observes that “It is indeed hard to imagine, say, Stephen Hawking boasting about being ‘obsessed’ with M-theory.”  It’s not that hard, but take it from me, don’t bother.  Worst fanfiction ever!  I got curious about this topic, though, so I searched around and found an article which states that “Hawking admits he’s obsessed with time travel.”  But it’s from Fox News, so maybe this is part of some secret right-wing plot to discredit science and/or contribute to language inflation by putting hyperbole in the mouths of prestigious figures.  Wait a second, why would Fox News want to encourage inflation?  I thought they were pro-austerity.  Have they been concealing their true agenda all this time?  Are they using a façade of conservatism to promote a radically anarchistic program of linguistic hyperinflation leading to the complete breakdown of communication, and thus democracy?  Is this why Glenn Beck is always crying about bald eagles or whatever?  It all fits.  First debutantes, then Calvin Klein, then Fox News…this conspiracy goes all the way to the top!

But Lasdun, blissfully unaware of the gathering storm, continues, “‘It’s a gesture of self-promotion…. They’re compensating for not having the capacity to get all that interested in things.  Younger people create an atmosphere of hysteria around themselves and get caught up in it.’”  I can remember when the word “hysteria” connoted a serious medical condition caused by a woman’s womb wandering throughout her body due to fluid imbalances, leading to insanity and apoplectic fits.  You used to have to smear honey on your… wait a minute, whose side is Mr. Lasdun on?  Now that I think about it, both he and Teddy Wayne have been using a suspiciously high amount of figurative language, for guys who are ostensibly so anti-hyperbole.  They’re just as bad as Fox News.  Now I don’t trust anyone.   All this time, has Teddy Wayne been pretending to crusade against hyperbole in order to conceal his role as the puppet master behind the Kate Moss illuminati inflation conspiracy?   My God, things are worse than I thought.  If I develop a conspiracy theory about obsessive use of the word “obsessed,” am I obsessed with being obsessed with being obsessed?

Overview

Likelihood that trend exists: 69/10 WHO CARES

Importance of trend in grand scheme of things: 0/10

Adherence to trend piece formula: 10/10 (obligatory Paragraph of Statistics, obligatory pearl-clutching about Youth of Today, obligatory assertions that the internet is to blame, obligatory needless “expert” commentary)

Best aspect of author’s writing style: Knows how to use Google

Suggestion for improving author’s writing style: Stop eavesdropping on teenage girls, you creep

“Light from the television filled the dark room and flickered on us like a fire but gave no warmth. The space between us on the couch spoke more about our relationship than we did to each other.”

No, maybe not like that.  The syntax of this sentence is almost as confusing as blaming a television for not performing the function of a space heater is misguided. When this guy’s next relationship starts to fizzle, he’s going to be like “the clanking, elderly radiator in my girlfriend’s bedroom emitted copious heat, but failed to display moving images of charismatic 1960′s advertising executives or provide us with entertainment in the form of hour-long serial narratives.”  Next time pay your gas bill, and read Consumer Reports before making a major purchase.

But the ill-informed incompetence of modern urbanites provides a surprisingly rich body of material for metaphor.  In “Limping Towards the Truth,” author Amary Wiggin had a big fight with her boyfriend and sprained her ankle.  “My limp persisted…I hobbled…I lurched…None of these facts could induce me to seek medical attention.”  Finally she “sulkily” consents to get the ankle looked at, and is informed that her injury is serious, but will heal in its own due time… just like a broken heart.  (The orthopedist didn’t add that part, but it was implied).  “Now, instead of limping around, insisting I am damage-proof, I listen to the hurt.”  Wait, so a painful heartbreak taught you to appreciate the importance of routine medical precautions? “Next time I’ll consider the potential risks before revealing my romantic feelings for a friend, or consuming improperly stored mayonnaise.”

Severed foot tendons taught the writer a lesson, but you can’t go around inflicting harm on various body parts every time you need to express your inner mental states.  Being a writer is painful enough.  There has to be another way.  Fortunately, Modern Love writers have converged upon the perfect solution:  Animals.   They’re the perfect metaphor.   Projecting your emotions onto an animal is easy; it’s less painful than falling down a flight of stairs, less boring than sitting too far away from each other on some stupid sofa, and slightly less ethically indefensible than having a baby just so you’ll have something to write about.

Maybe you already have a dog or a cat.  Great!  Use it as a prism through which to evaluate potential Mr. or Miss Rights.  In “So Much In Common, In Name Only,” the author online-meets a guy and thinks they’re fated to be together.  But when they meet in person, “he…revealed that his dog hated going on hikes, an essential pleasure my own dogs and I enjoy each weekend.”  She didn’t pursue the relationship, which is wise.  Sure, it sounds all romantic to be in an “opposites attract” love affair with someone whose dog has nothing in common with your dog.  But the day-to-day reality is, if your dogs don’t enjoy spending time together, they’ll drift apart.  You’ll be spending all your time at different dog parks, with other dogs who share your dogs’ passions.  Before long you’re in an extremely confusing and illegal emotional affair.  There’s a reason why old married couples’ dogs grow to look like each other.  That’s a thing that happens, right?  Anyway, normal pets have their uses, but they’re not that unique.  If you want to give your essay that “I Love Sarvis” edge, look into something more exotic.

In “A Twist of Fate,” Alexandria Marizano-Leznovich writes of her foray into snake-handling — literally!  But also figuratively, because she was a lesbian dating a man.  She’s ambivalent about the heterosexual lifestyle in general and her boyfriend specifically, but she tries to overcome those feelings, going so far as to one day tell him that “I thought I was finally ready to embrace our life together.  ‘You mean you’re ready to hold a tarantula?’ he asked.”

He had always wanted a pet tarantula, you see, and so tarantula tolerance symbolizes embracing their life together.  It’s as if this guy knew he was going to be guest-starring in a Modern Love essay.  But Marizano-Leznovich clearly thinks he’s an amateur, and that she can do better.

“’No, no,’ I said and started to explain, then stopped. I hadn’t planned the words that came next, but come they did. ‘I’d be willing to try holding a snake, though.’”  Holding a snake… I think I get it.  Very subtle.  Once you’ve tried holding a snake, maybe you can eat Polish sausage while smoking a cigar, polishing your gun, and wearing a pearl necklace at the Washington Monument.  ”Even Freud would have dismissed [the symbolism] as too obvious.”  Basing your writing on symbols that are too obvious is like being fat, or having too many dirty dishes in your sink:  No one can criticize you for it if you point it out first.  Imagine if the famous essayists of the past had adopted this rhetorical strategy:

• “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  Oh gross, I can’t believe I just wrote that.  I mean, I know every transcendental philosopher is always like ‘I don’t know if I’m really living’ or whatever, and it sounds like such a cliche, but I don’t know… I just feel sort of blah, you know?  My therapist was like ‘why couldn’t you live deliberately in the city,’ and I guess that’s probably true.  Maybe I should try giving up gluten instead.”
• “If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.  I mean, not literally die.  That’s a little hyperbolic.  But we would be perturbed.”
• “A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.  Heh, heh.  I said ‘hard.’”

Anyway, as a result of this symbolically freighted conversation, they end up at the snake store the very next morning.  Do all exotic pet purchases take place for reasons that only make sense in Freudian dream logic?  It’s like the Brooklyn MFA version of buying your child a baby chick for Easter, dyeing it pink, then panicking and flushing it down the toilet a week later when the kid loses interest.  PETA should do public service ads urging people to make their narcissistic self-actualization journeys cruelty-free.

But Marizano-Leznovich is into the idea, and so, like many a maiden in an 80s hair-metal song, finds herself “peering [at] a fat white albino snake.”  Welcome to my life, lady!  The store clerk, who presumably has seen this scenario play out many times before, tricks them into buying an innocent-looking little serpent that, as they discover when they get it home, will grow to 14 feet.  Now that is a phallic symbol!  “Pretzel was growing bigger….With each passing month, she’d grown, just as had my suspicions about my sexuality.”  The snake represents repressed lesbianism, but also a huge penis.  Metaphors don’t have to make sense.

She has fun feeding the snake mice and carrying it around on the subway.  “Having Pretzel felt weird in way that was interesting….I could comment to people prattling on about their cats and dogs: ‘I have a pet, too. What? Oh, she’s a python. Her name’s Pretzel.’”  You’ll have to let me know how “I have a pet, too” works as a conversational gambit.  It could be just the thing to break the ice at my Socially Awkward Fifth-Graders meetup.  Anyway, the couple split up, and the writer gives Pretzel away to a guy who takes in rescue snakes.  Unlike with most works of literature that feature a woman gazing in fascination at a fat white albino snake, this tale ends with the narrator accepting her true nature and renouncing male companionship.

How come Whitesnake never wrote a song about that?

But attaining happiness doesn’t always have to involve trifling with the life of an animal.  Sometimes it involves being dangerously codependent with an animal.  In “A Writer’s Tortoise Leads the Way to Happiness,” Caroline Leavitt proclaims “I never intended to get a tortoise.”  Neither did I!  That’s why I don’t have one.  Another intention successfully executed.  But it seems some people just can’t commit to a lifestyle.  The author and her boyfriend were casting about for a way to salvage their doomed relationship, and they decided a hypoallergenic pet would be just the thing.

They named the tortoise Minnie, but “we realized she was a he, after an eye-popping male display.”  You know the humblebragging trend has gotten out of hand when people are even boasting about the size of their tortoise’s junk.  Too much information!  There are certain pieces of data that are best shared only between you, your tortoise, and your tortoise’s urologist.

It was fun at first:  ”I bathed him in the sink. I hand-fed him avocado…I even kissed his shell.”  But in an absolutely astonishing development that nobody could have predicted, their relationship to the tortoise started eerily mirroring aspects of their relationship to each other.  ”He didn’t like the way I talked to Minnie every day, eye to eye (‘He’s just a reptile,’ he stressed)….The more time I spent discovering the tortoise, the more my boyfriend uncovered things about me he didn’t like….I had a more fulfilling relationship with the tortoise than I did with the boyfriend. Minnie and I let each other be who we were.”  I would love to hear all this from the boyfriend’s perspective.  I’m sure he had his flaws, but it’s hard to maintain a gracious demeanor while your significant other is passive-aggressively talking at you through a turtle.

{Boyfriend is watching an old episode of The Colbert Report and scrolling through photos on his phone.  Leavitt enters with tortoise, sits down on other end of sofa.}

Leavitt: And how was your day, Pretty Mr. Minnie?  Mommy missed oo so much!

Boyfriend:  Um…

Leavitt:  Has oo been home alone all day with no one to talk to?  Poor baby!  I know just how oo feels!

Boyfriend:  Look, if there’s something you’d like to….

Leavitt:  Nobody appreciates us, do they, Pretty Mr. Tortoise?

Boyfriend:  Caroline, I…

Leavitt:  No, they don’t!

Boyriend:  {Starts to speak; gives up}

Leavitt:  But that’s otay!  I still love you, even if nobody else does!  I wuv oo more than anyone else in the whole world!  Wuzza-wuzza-wuzza!

Boyfriend: {Stands up; looks around warily}

Leavitt:  {Rocking tortoise back and forth} ♫Hold me closer, tiny dancer!  Count the headlights on the hiiiiiiighway!♪♫

Boyfriend:  {Scuttles out front door; makes mad dash to nearest bar}

Eventually Leavitt dumps the boyfriend — maybe his male display wasn’t eye-popping enough? — and moves out on her own.  Still, life has its frustrations.  She wants to find a guy who will accept her for who she is, but everyone in the big city is a superficial phony who can’t accept the charming imperfections that make each individual human being unique.  Also, “sooner or later a date would ask, ‘Do we have to eat with the tortoise on the table?’”  Why is it so hard to find someone who’s willing to defy Society and its stultifying “no reptile cooties in the coq au vin” rule?

But if you hold out long enough, your dreams really can come true.  Leavitt finally meets the Prince Charming to her testudinalially-obsessed Cinderella:  Jeff, a journalist.  “Where my old boyfriend told me how obsessive I was about Minnie, Jeff celebrated our connection, making a fake newspaper cover featuring Minnie and me. (‘Startling Tales of Tortoise Life! She holds me under the faucet!’ the headline blared.)”  Where did this guy go to journalism school?  Based on that headline, this is surely the least juicy reptile celebrity gossip tabloid of all time.   Why is Minnie’s lifestyle of gender-bending and priapic exhibitionism being whitewashed in favor of bland lifestyle fluff pieces?  Lindsay Lohan would kill to have his press agent.

But blandness has its virtues.  Years pass, and their relationship stays strong, even as “I had a child…I got critically ill with a rare blood disorder… blah, blah blah.”  (I sort of skimmed over this part).  Finally, Minnie dies of old age, and they bury him in the back yard. Leavitt is distraught.  “I kept imagining Minnie’s bones floating up from the ground like something out of Stephen King’s ‘Pet Sematary.’”  In all fairness, Pet Sematary would not have been nearly as frightening if it had been about a tortoise.  The folksy old man next would have had so much time to warn everyone about the dangers of the ancient Indian burial ground.  That family could have been halfway to Mexico by the time the moldering, hideously undead body of their pet lumbered up to their front door, bent on extremely…slow…revenge.

“We’ve got to get out of here, as soon as we pack, and make some sandwiches, and do the dishes.”

“People told me about their dogs and cats who had died, and I thought, it’s easy to love the beautiful, the normal. But what about the gifts of loving the strange, the uncommon, the odd?”  Remind me not to tell you about my dogs and cats who died.  I had no idea we were being scored on difficulty. Anyway, Leavitt can afford to feel superior now, but what’s going to happen when she meets a memoirist whose husband’s adulterous affair with a Brazilian bikini model led her to discover a passion for taking in rescue cockroaches?

But you may not want to put in the effort and expense of caring for a pet.  Just go outside; there’s lots of essay-worthy animals out there.  The author of “Though Apart, We Faced a Common Enemy” had an amicable divorce, and was almost murdered by a swan, and she wants you to know about it:  ”My ex-husband… and I were once attacked by a murderous swan.”  They were kayaking on a lake, and the swan approached them in a menacing fashion.  A slow paddler, she was terrified:   “Lions, coyotes, jaguars and crazed swans all follow the same playbook: go for the easy kill.”  Citation needed!  Speaking of Wikipedia, my sources inform me that swans are “almost entirely herbivorous,” so they might want to rethink their policy of sharing a playbook with large land carnivores.   It’s also unclear how the author is familiar enough with the playbook of jaguars to recognize it when she encounters it on the great football field of life.   “Oh no!  A classic Statue-of-Liberty formation!  This is just like what happened in the Bolivian rain forest!”

“The swan attacked again, close enough that I could hear it hiss. It clearly meant to knock us from our kayaks.”  At this point, the swan was probably just tired of being psychoanalized.    “We cowered helplessly as the bloodthirsty beast advanced toward us, its sinuous neck writhing like a Burmese python in the act of squeezing the last cubits of air from the lungs of a wild hog.”  I made that last sentence up, but her prose does get a bit overheated.  Perhaps because of this, “We tried to tell people about the swan attack, but no one got it. The story must have sounded like children being chased by a duck, but I’m here to tell you that the swan wanted to drown us.” I don’t think it sounds like being chased by a duck, but it does remind me a bit of this:

But what if you go outside, and you don’t get attacked by animals?  Don’t worry.  Your experiences are still profound and meaningful.    Close your eyes and count to 100 and spin around in a circle.  When you open your eyes, whatever you see is a metaphor for the innermost depths of your soul.

“I squinted into the setting sun as our boys, 6 and 9, climbed down from the dusty John Deere tractor, dwarfed by the wind turbine churning quietly over the front 40. They were asking my cousin Dennis about the harrow he was pulling, used to break up clods of dirt in the field…the harrow. Like our mixed-political marriage.”  Oh, of course.  Wait, what?  In “The Mixed-Politics Marriage,” Sheila Heen counsels a bipartisanship that is positively Friedman-esque in its intellectual and ethical vacuousness, while leaving readers puzzled as to what the hell a harrow is.

“John and I run closely aligned at the foundation by love, continued attraction, and from sharing the weight of that gift bag of irritations that comes with any modern marriage. But we continue to part company on most pages of the party-political catalog of how-best-to’s and should-or-shouldn’t-be-able-to’s.”  Not to mention the what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about’s, why-in-hell-would-you-even-want-to’s, and setting-our-nation’s-legacy-of-civil-rights-progress-back-fifty-years-by-doing-that’s.

“Both sides jockey to display that peculiar brand of American can-doism we share. We don’t know what to do, but by golly, whatever the problem is, put us in charge and we’ll do it better!”  I suppose that to sustain a mixed-politics marriage, it would help to view megalomaniacal incompetence as childishly endearing.  We’ve built up a barrier of wilfull ignorance about the lives of those less fortunate so that we never have to empathize with them or understand what they think and feel, but jumpin’ jehosephat, we’ll subject them all to mandatory drug testing!

In any case, “Both sides are deeply committed to cultivating the same American field.”  Certain sides seem more “deeply committed” than others.  Hey, what happened to  my nice field?  And where did that smoking pile of rubble come from?

“We reflect one another’s values in the sharp disks as we turn through another election season.”  I’ve read this article three times, and I still don’t understand Heen’s metaphors, especially the part about a gift bag filled with irritations.  Worst red carpet event ever!  But a political disagreement is, at least, a real problem.  Some of the dilemmas faced by Modern Love scribes are so arcane as to be imperceptible to the naked eye.

Such is the case with Margot Page in “Labels of Married Life, In a New Light“:  “’I now pronounce you husband and wife,’ the minister said to Anthony and me….Although I was thrilled about what we were undertaking, I cringed.”  Etiquette fail!  These are your wedding vows, not a Buzzfeed post about “13 People Who Fell Asleep While Operating Forklifts”; it’s something of a faux pas for members of the wedding party to cringe.  For similar reasons, it’s considered gauche for the officiant to make finger quotation marks when pronouncing you man and wife, for the university registrar to draw rageface comics on your doctoral diploma, and for Queen Elizabeth to *headdesk* while conferring knighthoods on distinguished citizens of the British Empire.

But Page has an excuse: The word “wife” feels “archaic and weird” to her.  You might object that many words and phrases in the English language are archaic and weird, such as “o’clock,” “February,” and “hamstring.”  Can’t this sensitive young couple become accustomed to familiar stimuli, just like everyone else?

It seems not.  ”For our first decade of marriage, Anthony and I employed traditional spouse words only from a distance born of snark: ‘Hey Husband, can you use your big strong hands to get the lid off this jar?’  ‘Hello, Wife. How are you this fine day?’”  It’s hard to imagine that joke staying fresh for more than seven, eight years, tops.  But maybe it was all in the delivery.  I can’t wait to hear what kind of chuckles they’ll come up with when one of them is lying on their deathbed.  “Forsooth, noble lady, parting is such sweet sorrow!  Peradventure I shalt make out my will eftsoons!”

“’Wife’ smacked of ‘old ball and chain.’  And don’t even get me started on the fact that the word ‘husband’ had no negative colloquial equivalents.”  Don’t even get her started!  So crazy!  This is like if someone tried to turn the Women’s Studies 101 class that blew their mind into an hilarious standup comedy routine.  “What’s the deal with religion?  Has anyone ever noticed that God is always portrayed as a man?  Do you think He leaves the toilet seat up?”

Anyway, it’s easy for us straights to hate words, what with how they have connotations, and reflect the complex and troubled history of human culture.  But some people don’t even get to have wedding vows at which to cringe.  Same-sex marriage was finally legalized in Washington State in 2012, at which point Page noticed that gay people wanted to get married:  “I watched in wonder as my friends claimed the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ with reverence and delight and gusto…there was no creepy ownership for these friends.”  Through watching them, she learned to accept being a wife.  Civil rights are good for something after all!

“And I also can leave behind the images of balls, chains, housedresses and Archie yelling from his recliner.”  That show has been off the air for 34 years.  I think it’s time we all tried to put the Bunkers’ toxic legacy behind us.

But what if you don’t even have a privileged, oblivious-white-person luxury problem?  Make your own!    That’s what David Finch did in “Seduced By a Gift That Broke the Rules,” a heartwarming tale of generosity gone awry.  He states that a proper gift must be one that ”the recipient has requested…offers some practical benefit for the recipient… [or] reflects the personal interests of the recipient.”  However, there is a conflicting set of rules: “A Valentine’s gift also should be red or heart-themed and come in some form of chocolate, jewelry or lingerie.”  Finch disapproves of these rules as “preposterous stipulation[s],” even though he’s just informed us that they exist.  Having dreamed them into life, he courageously defies them every year “by taking Kristen out for dinner or for a short romantic getaway.”  But then one year, he decides to be reverse-double-iconoclastic by rebelling against his Valentine’s Day rules and his original set of rules, and instead following the mainstream Valentine’s Day rules that he also made up in the first place.  I think this is what William Blake had in mind when he coined the phrase “mind-forg’d manacles.”

As a result of this ideological confusion, “I found myself standing face-to-face with an extraordinarily busty mannequin in an upscale lingerie boutique. ‘She’ll love it,’ said the vaguely European-looking saleswoman.”  How is she “vaguely” European-looking?  Europeans are only “vaguely” different from regular white people in the first place.  I think Finch couldn’t remember whether snooty saleswomen are supposed to be French, Portuguese or Ukranian, and was too lazy to look it up in his Handbook of Journalism Clichés.

“Was it practical? Hardly. I would undoubtedly wrench the article from Kristen’s body the moment she came within reach, so why bother putting it on?”  The word “wrench” should never be part of anyone’s foreplay vocabulary.  But if Finch’s sexual technique is based on actions better suited to fixing a sink, his logic is impeccable.  “If I see you in that outfit, I’ll be so overcome with lust that I’ll be unable to restrain myself for a moment, so what’s the point in buying it?  It all just seems so — *sigh* — frivolous.”  Yes, there are few things more sigh-inducingly frivolous than the attempt to make pleasurable experiences more enjoyable.  I imagine Finch is also to be heard at upscale restaurants, complaining that the better the food is, the faster you’ll eat it, so you should have just gone to Waffle House.  He refuses to try wine that costs more than $8 a bottle, because if you get used to the good stuff, you won’t enjoy Boone’s Farm as much.  What’s the point of buying a comfortable mattress?  You’ll just sleep so deeply that you won’t even know you’re asleep.  David Finch is the only guy who’s actually banged his head against a brick wall because “it feels so good when I stop.”

“Also, I’m a man in my 30s, which means I am always primed for action anyway. I’m generalizing here, but I think it’s safe to say that we men do not require a romantic visual to get in the mood. We just need the woman to be physically present, and, frankly, even that’s debatable.”  Ordinarily I would object to one person speaking for an entire gender, but the point he’s making is so nuanced, I’ll let it slide.  I wonder if his wife has a similarly progressive attitude towards gender relations?  Come February 14th, she’ll be like “Happy Valentine’s Day.  I’m going to my book club.  Here’s a paper towel roll for you to stick your dick in.”

Yes, the battle of the sexes has never been more relevant — or more hilarious!  “Kristen, for example, is always amazed when she has the flu and her hair is all matted and snarly and she hasn’t showered or changed out of her pajamas in two days and still I hit her up for sex. Lingerie, pajamas, a hospital gown: makes zero difference to the segment of the population known for wearing black socks during intercourse.”  Some men are awfully proud of their lack of fashion sense.  I know I say this all the time, but just a few short centuries ago, you guys were known for wearing wigs, silk brocade and skintight culottes.  You could probably learn the difference between black and white socks if you really exerted yourself.

The David Finch of the 1610′s laments: “I wore a white codpiece after Labor Day AGAIN! I’m such an idiot!”

“Logic and rational thinking alone, however, could not overcome one crucial factor that seemed to be clouding my judgment: the stunning image of Kristen wearing something terrifically slinky, just for me.”  Hey, you just contradicted what you said before!  Just now, when you said clothing “makes zero difference,” and then you said the opposite thing one sentence later!  I knew it!  Your entire worldview is internally incoherent and self-deconstructive, revealing itself to be a product of ideological mystification in the service of an oppressive patriarchal ideology!  You should have just gone with the Sephora giftcard.

Anyway, his wife refuses to wear the underwear, and chalks his gift up to the hilarious but inevitable dumbness of all males, so the balance of the universe is maintained.  But I think we’ve all learned something from reading his story of self-inflicted humiliation.  Indeed, whether you’re a seasoned snake-charmer or an amateur wrench abuser, you can probably see a little of yourself in these authors.  And their tales contain lessons we’d all do well to remember.  Such as…um… don’t marry a Republican.  Seek medical attention if you experience any pain or swelling.  Only ever go kayaking with someone who paddles slower than you.  And if the person who’s trying to sell you something has a fake accent or tells you that the snake he’s holding won’t grow any bigger, run.

The Travel section does offer some helpful, informative pieces, written from a neutral perspective and designed to help the typical traveler find her way.  But this format is difficult for a jaded journalist to pull off, lacking as it does in personality or narrative interest.  And the periodical format’s hunger for novelty makes it inevitable that some scribes would package their experiences as news.  Furthermore, world-weary professional travellers can sometimes lose touch with the mindset of overworked provincials.  Thus the matter-of-fact articles are often overwhelmed by those that try to juice up their subject with trend-piece glamour, or drag it down with angsty moaning and luxury-problem griping.   So, in this, the first in a (very occasional) series on the lesser-read sections of the Times, we’ll explore the most common Travel pitfalls to watch out for.

1. “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better!”

The lack of symbolic, ego-stroking luxuries in a context where one might expect to find them is often a cause for gnashing of teeth.  For instance, Jesse McKinley reports being disappointed in today’s so-called first class, explaining that “My seat was wide, the armrest was enormous,” but when the flight attendant handed him a damp towel, it “had the unmistakable, oft-used texture of a bargain washcloth.”  Similarly, a visitor to a Caribbean resort complain that solo travellers have to “endure hotels where the Jacuzzi is little more than a kiddie pool.”  And at a lavish Miami hotel, “my ‘deluxe’ room was large, though the mattress and linens were thin; the toilet felt as if it were in a broom closet.”

But the downsides of exotic accommodations are even worse when you’re hoping to stay for good, as Danielle Pergament laments in “Viva la Villa!“:  “Technically, I’m in Tuscany on vacation with my family. But only slightly less technically, I’m also here to look at houses to buy.”  But only thirdly less technically, I’m here to make money writing about my life experiences for the Travel section.  How busy am I, right?

Pergament’s “dream” is to own a house in Tuscany, but she is beset at every turn by hurdles.  “A few years ago, my husband and I started a savings account and I actually named it the ‘Italy account.’ Our budget depends on whom you ask. I say a million euros! My husband would say something closer to … half that!”  What a wacky argument!  This is just when normal couples argue about whether to pay all of the electric bill right now, or just the part that’s overdue.

Anyway, she finally did find a piece of available Tuscan real estate, only to have her dream crushed into dust once again.  “To be fair, [the house] had some qualities to recommend it: it was big and had a small annex that would come in handy for renting out. The backyard was the selling point: great view, large brick patio and a respectable-size pool. It even had a mini-vineyard.”  How… fair.  So in the plus column, we can write down “has patio, annex, pool and mini-vineyard; is a villa in Tuscany.”  But it’s too late, the minus column is already full.  “When it was time to check out the interior, I couldn’t look past the stripes. I glanced inside only long enough to get depressed by the low ceilings and — I know I would redecorate but still — sad, floral bedspreads.”  There goes my plan to sell Danielle Pergament my gently used Bentley.  Why did I ever insist on plaid upholstery?!  Anyway, here’s the stripey villa:

Now I’m depressed, too.

2. “Wallowing in Luxury Is the New Black”

Fortunately, not all travel experiences are going down the tubes; some are getting better.   Enterprising travel-preneurs have sought to defeat the tedium and staleness of V.I.P lodgings by mashing them up with forms of travel that are more original, but too hard to actually do in real life, like camping.  Jennifer Conlin’s “Camping, but Not Quite Roughing It” shares the good news:  “If the eco-friendly idea of falling asleep under the stars and roasting marshmallows around a campfire appeals to you, but the reality of pitching a tent and sleeping on bumpy ground does not, glamping, the new term being used for upscale — or glamorous — camping, could be your ideal green vacation.”  Has today’s culture of designer canvas bags and organic juice bars wrought such confusion about the nature of ecology, any activity that involves viewing or touching nature is now thought to be “eco-friendly”?  I always assumed the purpose of camping was that you get to enjoy being in nature, not that you’re doing nature a favor by deigning to grace it with your presence.

In any case, benevolent nature-visitors have plenty of options.  Tahoe getaway Basecamp is a climber-inspired hotel “with a modern, eco-chic touch,” the “DNA” of whose “brand” the owner describes as “a riff on the idea of roughing it.”  I always said the problem with camping, as a rich, immersive sensory experience, is that it isn’t high concept enough.  There has to be a way to make the infinitely complex moment-to-moment apprehension of the phenomenal world chic again.

And that’s just what glamping is trying to do:  “Though dismissed by hard-core leave-no-trace campers (who don’t so much as move a rock for fear of affecting the area), glamping can still be an environmentally sound outdoor experience.”  Truthfully, I would much rather have read an interview with these hardcore campers.  They sound like fascinating individuals.  With their purist anti-rock-moving stance, they’re like the vegans of weekend getaways.  I can just imagine them rolling their eyes when their friends claim that “I could never be a hardcore camper, I love moving rocks too much.”   All rubbing two sticks together as they cast contemptuous glances at other campers’ portable stoves and Starbucks Via.  These people are not fucking around.  Let them see you carve your initials into a tree, and they’ll cut ties with you because “If you’re not a hardcore camper now, you never were.”

But the freedom to disarrange inert aspects of the landscape is a bare fraction of the luxuries glamping affords.   “At Paws Up, a ranch resort… campers can pass up the cabins and stay in Tent City or in one of the newly built tents at River Camp on the Blackfoot River, complete with king-sized beds and art on the walls, a personal butler and private master bath (though it is a short walk away). Rates start at $695 per night for two but include three meals a day.”  Well, if it includes meals, count me in.  My camping budget is $200 a night, maximum, but my significant other and I typically spend $495 a day on food, so it’s a wash.

“’We call it nature on a silver plate,’ Terre Short, Paws Up’s general manager, said. ‘I think glamping has really hit its stride this summer as the ultimate connect with nature.’”  Sounds like a value-add that could really leverage the great outdoors’ core competencies.  An opportunity to interface with the existence of organic substances and biological life, while harnessing nature’s bandwidth to optimize mission-critical deliverables.  Can I buy shares in Nature’s IPO?

3. “Lifestyles of the Budget-Conscious and Stupid”

Maybe a four-figure fake campsite isn’t in your budget.  Fortunately for people like you, the Times is intermittently aware of your existence.   Matt Gross’s “Going Deep for the Cheap in New York” informs would-be visitors that “For those of us who live here, the expense of New York City is something we’ve long since adjusted to. Designer tank tops for $140, truffled hamburgers for $150, studio apartments renting for upward of $3,000 — even in the midst of recession, these things seem somehow normal, the price of admission to the greatest city in the world.”  Why, back home in podunk, you could get a truffled hamburger for $79.99!  And when it came to designer tank tops, Jolene would whip you up some in the woodshed in exchange for an apron full of fresh eggs.  It does indeed seem like spending inflated prices for obscure luxury niche products is “just one of those New York things.”

But for visitors, these prices cause sticker shock.  The Frugal Traveler is here to help.  “Check out the Cheap Eats issues of both Time Out New York (under $10) and New York Magazine.”  You… can do that?  Just recommend another publication?  I’d like to see what would happen if the A section tried the same thing.  “President Obama blasts opponents in new speech — for more, go to Google, type in ‘Obama,’ and click the tab thingy on the left that says ‘news’!”

“Check Chowhound.com‘s message boards for on-the-ground intelligence about what to eat and where.”  Don’t tell people about message boards!  You’re putting yourself out of business!

“To figure out what’s going on, you could scan the event listings of New York magazine, The Village Voice or Time Out.”  What if I go to Village Voice or Time Out, and they’re just like “ask your Facebook friends for ideas on what’s fun to do?”  And then my Facebook friends are like “I don’t know, try asking your waiter or hotel concierge.”  Then the concierge is like “may I venture to suggest you peruse the New York Times Frugal Traveler column?  It’s all a big round robin.  I’m beginning to suspect that the concept of “things to do in New York” is a mere façade, propped up by a laborious series of deferrals.

No no, the Frugal Traveler has located some concrete suggestions.  “As I write this, [TheSkint.com] tells me, ‘nigella lawson’s still in town … enjoy free samples of her christmas rocky road and cranberry + white chocolate chip cookies while she signs her “nigella christmas” @ williams-sonoma chelsea.’”  If you’re a typical New York tourist, this tip will dramatically slash your celebrity-autograph-and-white-chocolate-chip-cookie budget.  Assuming you pay list price for the $35 book Nigella Christmas, that’s a savings of… negative $25.01!  (I am also assuming that New York cookies are more expensive than regular cookies.)

But that’s not all.  “There are daily links to free mp3s (the Futureheads, Sinatra, RJD2) and hey, cool, a coupon for a $49 dental cleaning…. With all the money you’ve saved so far, you can certainly afford to go shopping.”  With all the money I’ve saved by not paying retail price for a Futureheads album?  All kidding aside, you’d have to pay me to listen to those MP3s.   And I just got my teeth cleaned, so I’m out another $49.  Let’s stop here, before the total savings from these tips exceeds negative $100.

Anyway, budget constraints are not the sole topic of useless tips.  In “A Battle Plan for Jet Lag,” Stephanie Rosenbloom explains why travellers’ internal clocks betray us so.  “’It’s only in the past 100 years that we’ve been able to jump time zones,’ said Steven W. Lockley, a consulting member of NASA’s fatigue management team, who is also a neuroscientist specializing in sleep medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard in Boston. ‘We haven’t evolved a way to adapt yet.’”  I love that “yet.”  This dude is really optimistic about the potential for selection pressure to produce jet lag-adapted humans.  With the rate at which people die of jet lag, it should only take a few more centuries, right?  And the radiation from the security scanners could help us develop beneficial mutations.

“There are, however, ways to cope. Begin by determining whether you are traveling east or west.”  Can do.  I’ll just look it up in my trusty Atlas.  It’s right here in front of me, on my bookshelf, so I’ll begin by determining which direction to walk in order to approach it.  Next I’ll have to determine which foot to put in front of the other foot, and which hand to grasp the Atlas with.  Maybe I should just stay home!

4. “The Accidental Douchebag”

If you’re not a budget-conscious but technologically and geographically illiterate would-be tourist, then perhaps you’re an Important Business Person who’s on the way to a Very Important Meeting.  This reader is addressed in Stephanie Rosenbloom’s “How the Tough Get Going.“  The piece presents words of wisdom from Tim Ferriss, a lifehacking guru whose advice exists in some nexus midway between Tyler Durden, Steve Bruhl, and the anonymous hero who came up with the idea of party balloons as condoms.  Rosenbloom describes how Ferriss recently saved time at the airport: “Using Uber, a cashless car service, and Clearcard, a fast-pass for airport security, he zipped from home to gate in 20 minutes. A friend making the same flight spent 33 minutes on the security line alone.”

As much as I dislike the “first class ain’t what it used to be” trope, this approach is even worse.  Ferriss and his ilk are always looking down with Olympian disdain on anyone who didn’t budget enough time for Abu Ghraib-style strip searches on the way to grandma’s.  If only shoe removal and gel confiscation hadn’t proven to be so maddeningly effective, we could all save time on the way to the gate the old-fashioned way, by walking fast.  Fortunately, hour-long security lines aren’t just the best way to foil terrorists; they also provide material for the burgeoning travel tip industry.  “Air travel is essentially a microcosm of a society in which widening class divisions force ordinary citizens to endure troubling invasions of privacy and disregard for Constitutional rights which the wealthy can simply pay to avoid, plus you might miss your flight.  Quick fix:  Have lots of money, and pay for better treatment.  Those suckers in the security line will feel like idiots!”

“’I had lunch and polished off two conference calls before my friend even got his shoes back on,’ Mr. Ferriss said.”  Why do business dudes always brag about all the time they save so they can spend it on conference calls?  It’s like bragging about all the meals you skipped so you could eat a jar of room-temperature Hellman’s mayonnaise.

“Oh, the monotony of cutting and pasting details from confirmation e-mails — plane tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals — into your online calendar.”  Is this a real problem, though?  How many confirmation e-mails could you possibly receive?  It seems like another case of “Skymall Syndrome,” a disorder in which the sufferer is driven to devise abstruse and recondite inconveniences which she then experiences as oppressive burdens to be ruthlessly eliminated.   Air travel seems particularly conducive to a sense that if only you could clear your life of mundane irritations (insufficiently tan feet, inefficient pancake batter dispensation, disorganized watch collection, lack of underwater cell phone capacity, necessity of manually grasping wine, coffee and blow dryers), you could break free from quotidian routine and spend your days doing — what?  Some activity of such inherent meaning, value and purpose, such ontological plenitude and transcendent immanence, that your nagging sense of alienation and ennui would drop away, leaving you to flow gently with life’s current — at one, finally, with a numinous present.  Of course, the obsessive pursuit of convenience serves only to defer autotelic experience ever further with the purchase of each astronaut pen or cell phone wrist strap.  As meaningful life experiences recede endlessly over the horizon, the means/ends dichotomy inherent in the capitalist value system collapses in on itself, leaving existence blanched of meaning, the quest to avoid wasted time paradoxically elevated to the status of an empty (and time-consuming) goal.  You’re worse off than when you started — much worse, because now you have a Brobdignagian sporting-event chair.

Ferriss uses some app to avoid cutting-and-pasting; he is also reputed to avoid checking suitcases, and to “[sleep] with an eye mask and earplugs.”  But not all his suggestions are quite so predictable.  He advises saving money by parking illegally on the street, instead of paying for the airport lot.  “A monthlong trip cost him $115 in parking tickets compared with $540 for airport parking.”  Poor Ferris:  A four-hour work week, a six-minute gym routine, an eight-second suitcase packing protocol, and nobody likes him enough to drive him to the airport.  The un-hacked state of Tim Ferriss’s social life aside, this is the only potentially useful tip in the article, so naturally it’s the one that drove the New York Times editorial staff insane.  Frank Bruni objects: “Don’t pay for airport parking, [Ferriss] advised in The Times, if the accrued tickets from leaving your car on the street won’t be as expensive. Sure, you’re unlawfully hogging a space someone else might make legal use of; maybe you’re thwarting street sweepers, too. Not your problem. A conscience is for chumps.”  Alternate-side street sweeping: an ethical challenge for our times.  It’s nice to be conscientious, but am I really supposed to pay $10 a day just to avoid the karmic guilt of depriving a law-abiding citizen of a plum space in front of Olive Garden?  Actually, I’m not sure where you’re supposed to be doing all this illicit parking; it’s not like there’s street parking near the airport.  Maybe you’re supposed to park near a hotel and use their free shuttle service?  Wait a minute, I think I just… invented a time-saving travel tip.  This is such a rush.  Lifehacking power flows through my veins like ichor.  I feel like a God!

“Recently San Francisco International Airport visitors who had Klout scores of 40 or higher and were using the site’s iPhone app were given free access to the Cathay Pacific Airways first- and business-class lounge, even if they weren’t passengers of the airline.”  What a convivial time must have been had in the Cathay Pacific Airways first- and business-class lounge that day.  Even the actual first-class passengers were probably like “who are these douchebags.”

5.  “Idyll, Interrupted; or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Bahamas”

No matter how efficiently you prepare for your vacation, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have a good time once you get there.  TV critic Alessandra Stanley begins her account of a doomed Miami resort trip with the pseudo-Wildean line “One of the good things about divorce is that you get to see less of your children,” and it only gets worse from there.  But that’s nothing.  In the angstily-titled “Single in the Caribbean,” Stephanie Rosenbloom recounts her time at the Turks and Caicos Club Med, where she was forced to “[escape] from a mob of bronzed bodies dancing under the stars in whipped-up, blissed-out unison to a 1980s disco hit.”  Sounds terrible, but that’s how it is at the Med, and always has been.  “A 1970 article in The New York Times described a Club Med in Martinique as rife with semi-nude swingers and a sensual atmosphere ‘that middle age should not be forced to endure.’”  Now that you mention it, the Times hasn’t changed much over the years, either.  How can the wary visitor avoid all that sensuality and fun?

Easily, in fact.  Rosenbloom describes herself as “reluctant to drink the Club Med Kool-Aid”; highlights of her trip include being “sober,” “[slipping] into bed shortly after midnight,” and “[observing] aqua gym class from my lounge chair.”  Unaccountably, she was left sitting alone at dinner.  “All around me, the restaurant was abuzz with laughter, the sound of wine splashing into glasses.”  What are they doing with that wine, pouring it out of a helicopter?  Keep it down!  I’m trying introspect over here!

“One culinary note: if you take nothing else from Club Med, take the sublime white chocolate bread.”  You flew thirteen hundred miles to a tropical paradise, and you’re impressed by a pastry?

Because the Caribbean was so traumatic, Rosenbloom tried the solo travel thing again in a less intimidating locale:  Chicago.  “Parachuting into a major city on one’s own has its perils. It’s not like lolling on a beach or rafting through the Grand Canyon. In a city, there are dodgy neighborhoods, dodgier men and jammed bars and restaurants where you’ll be parked at a table for one.”  But the risk of murder and ostracism aren’t the only surprises in the Windy City.  “At the front desk the staff was so friendly I suspected they were overcompensating for some unpleasant news they were about to spring. But all I got was a warm cookie and a key….  The geniality was almost unnerving.”  I suppose the 12 percent friendliness differential between New York and Chicago would take some getting used to.  It’s a good thing Rosenbloom didn’t go to Little Rock, or she’d have developed schizophrenic hallucinations.

Anyway, the hotel was nice.  But Rosenbloom didn’t go there to make friends.  “I was there for convenience, including easy access to Roof — my first stop.”  She’s really “hacked” the hotel room-bar transportation issue.  Have she and Tim Ferriss ever been photographed together?

Proving that travel writers are just like us, Rosenbloom did indeed head to the hotel bar first.  “I took a seat. Panoramic views from the deck and floor-to-ceiling windows made it easy to be simultaneously present and miles away.”   That is one way to describe the effect of windows.  It could also be stated, more prosaically, that they allow you to sit in a chair while looking at objects.  “Gazing out at Marina City’s towers, rising like two corncobs (as the locals call them) from the banks of the Chicago River, I daydreamed about what it might be like to live there.”  It’s just like the charming rusticity of Chicagoans to compare skyscrapers to corncobs.  You sweet, naïve yokels.  In fact, I understand Chicago natives compare all their local landmarks to corn.  The Sears Tower is the “single corncob.”   The shore of Lake Michigan is “maize beach.”   The Museum of Science and Industry is “huskers’ heaven.”  Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House is “the ol’ corn-grillin’ pan.”  Union Station is “the big indoor cornfield.”  Cloud Gate is “the shiny bean-shaped corn kernel.”  It’s a little laborious, but Midwesterners have a lot of time to kill.

NEEDS BUTTER

On a three-day trip, Rosenbloom didn’t have time to do everything, so her account is strewn with wistful subjunctives relating all the activities she would, could, or might have tried.  “I could have stayed in the tony Gold Coast amid lavish town houses, or in artsy Wicker Park with its laid-back bars, or in another of the city’s dozens of neighborhoods… If I could have squeezed it into my itinerary, I would have attended a Windy City Explorers MeetUp…. I ended up hailing a cab to the Pump Room, but if I hadn’t, I could have texted for one…. You could spend a whole weekend in places like Wicker Park and Bucktown with their neighborhood bars and denim-and-flannel dress code.”  And back at Roof, “had I peered through the telescope, I might have lingered even longer, zooming in on one real estate fantasy after another.”  Daydreaming about all the places you’ve never seen is one thing, but fantasizing about what it would have been like if you’d daydreamed about something is just sad, and kind of confusing.

(Although, it would be great if Rosenbloom would take over Thomas Friedman’s column.  She’d be like, “I glanced across the rain-drenched Dubai streets at a waiting taxicab.  There were hundreds of cabs, each containing a no doubt articulate and insightful local driver.  If I’d taken a cab, I might have gazed at the driver’s ID tag, fantasizing about what it would be like to ask him what he thought about the Arab democracy revolutions.  But my destination was only a block away.  I decided to walk.”)

Of course, she might have seen more sights if she hadn’t spent so much time boozing it up at hotel bar.  “On a different evening at Roof, this time well past midnight, two go-go dancers twirled like woozy tops, flanking a D.J. who was blasting Paula Abdul’s ‘Straight Up.’”  You’ve really captured this experience with Flaubertian richness.  Is there some manual out there for lazy writers stipulating that to create local-color descriptions of bars, you must mention the wackiest thing you saw there and name the one song you recognized playing over the P.A.?

One experience that really got its hooks in her was a boat tour.  While at first annoyed because “there weren’t enough good seats or cookies,” she ultimately found it magical.  “’Density,’ said our guide, pointing up at the skyline shimmering in the dying sun, ‘creates vitality.’  I shivered. This time, it wasn’t because I was chilly. It was because the Windy City blew me away.” Oh, brother.  That must have been some lecture on urban planning.  “Then my hat flew off my head towards the ceiling.  This time, it wasn’t being sucked upwards by a malfunctioning vent.  It was in astonishment at the variety of choices on the menu.”

Later, in the hip neighborhood, “People in their 20s and 30s adorned with clunky 1980s-style headphones and glasses were reading and eating alone on couches, or clacking on their Macs. “  Atmosphere!  That sounds like people in their 20s and 30s, all right.  “But back to the Public hotel, where, outside, women were teetering in stilettos — tipsy, smoking, gabbing on cellphones, or all of the above. Had I been teleported to the meatpacking district?”  Stupid women!  What with their stilettos, and their phones, and the fact that they drink and smoke in bars.  I have a feeling that you could as graceful as a prima ballerina in your heels, and Travel/Leisure writers would still accuse you of “teetering.”  Welcome to the world of colorful descriptions, where people on cell phones are always “gabbing”, women in heels are always “teetering,” music is always “blasting,” skylines are forever “shimmering,” the setting sun is eternally “dying,” computer keyboards are inevitably “clacking,” wine is everlastingly “splashing” into glasses, beach bodies are universally “bronzed,” and every cookie is mouth-watering.

Bonus Question: What’s With All the Cookies?

Without even trying, we’ve already encountered several references to cookies and related delicacies.  And the cookie theme isn’t just a coincidence — it’s a full-blown obsession.  In “Which Bus Should I Take to the Hamptons,” Rosenbloom evaluates the perks of different services.  “I was on my way to Montauk on the hushed Hampton Ambassador bus… as the pleasant man in the polo shirt went from seat to seat with newspapers, chips, cookies, coffee. I was almost hoping to get stuck in traffic.”  A rival bus line offers “party mix, cookies, granola bars, coffee, water, lemonade and wine, all included,” while yet another features “little bags of pretzels, chocolate chip cookies and other diet busters at a bar at the back of the bus, all included.”  But it’s not just Rosenbloom.  Wherever there are cookies, you’ll find carb-starved scribes taking up their pens in praise.  Bill Pennington celebrates the presence of “free cookies” at a Beaver Hill, Colorado resort; Bob Tedeschi looks back gratefully on “free cookies” at a Philadelphia International Airport lounge.  The Frugal Traveler is especially cookie-conscious, reminiscing about a “tray of free chocolate chip cookies” at a travel convention, and scavenging for “free cookies as big as your face” in Boston,” and feasting on “warm cookies and cold milk” in business class, and being offered “coffee and Swedish cookies” by a Nordic innkeeper.

In the erratic world of travel, all this points to a comforting certainty.  Okay, so airfare and lodging may be ruinously expensive.  So you may encounter myriad humiliations before even reaching your gate.  You may find all your fears and inhibitions waiting for you at your destination, and be mocked or ignored by the locals.  You may spend a week shivering in a leaky tent, or sighing in an underwhelming Tuscan mansion.  The whole ordeal may serve only as a depressing reminder that your that your life is slipping through your fingers faster than you can experience it.  But at least you can be sure of one thing:  Wherever you go, there will be cookies.  And New York Times travel reporters need a bigger food budget.

Unless they actually are.  If so, let’s nail those honkies to a cross.

And indeed, Julia Moskin’s “Raw Panic” informs us that “what should be a beautiful and inspiring sight — your kitchen, overflowing with seasonal produce — is sometimes an intimidating tableau of anxiety.”  Tell that to the Haitians, amirite?  “Tableau of anxiety” sounds unduly Freudian.  Unless you just walked into your kitchen, realized it was actually your old high school where you were being forced to retake Calculus, noticed you weren’t wearing pants, all your teeth fell out, and the Calculus teacher was actually your mother-in-law, you are overreacting to a little potential wiltage.

“The knobbly piles and dirt-caked bunches are overwhelming.”  That’s… what she said?  Also, if that’s really a problem that you have, you might want to upgrade your kitchen storage system from piles and bunches to some sort of shelf.  Maybe acquire a refrigerator at some point down the road.  Are these people also going around naked because “the sweat-soaked ball of clothes in the laundry hamper is depressing”?  Or failing to shower, because the tub’s patina of mildew and bewildering coruscations of rust are a “oneiric charnel-house of despair”?  Get help!

Actually, they are getting help.  “’People often feel overwhelmed in the kitchen, and when all this produce suddenly arrives, they panic,’ said Ronna Welsh, a chef in Brooklyn who teaches workshops on, among other topics, produce management.”   Unit 1, Lesson 1: Wash any visible cakes of dirt off produce before proceeding.  I wonder what the “other topics” are.  Spatula Information Technology?  Seminar in Applied Putting Butter on Top of Things?  Coupons as a Second Language?  The Dialectics of Taking Out the Trash?   Chocolate Chips Vs. Raisins: Global Ethics of Cookie Production?

“Vegetable anxiety can strike anyone at this time of year: C.S.A. subscribers, compulsive farm-stand stoppers and even vegetarians.”  Even vegetarians!  A group long known as “the Don Drapers of luxury problems” for their sang-froid in the face of domestic affliction.  My mamma always told me there are three kinds of people in this world: C.S.A. subscribers, compulsive farm-stand shoppers, and vegetarians.  You can identify each group by its main characteristic, a tendency to panic when looking at large quantities of vegetables.  (My mamma didn’t understand the purpose of categorization, but this way you don’t have to bother telling them apart.)

“’All this produce arrives with a deadline,’ said Benjamin Elwood, a lawyer in St. Paul. ‘It’s like when a DVD comes from Netflix. You feel like you have to watch the movie ASAP in order to get your money’s worth, but the pressure makes you not want to watch it.’”  Yes. Having to consume edible nutrients to survive is like subscribing to Netflix. It’s like, who needs it?  This craze for consuming caloric energy to fuel your body’s metabolic processes is just another symptom of our hyper-wired, info-addicted consumer mentality.  I think you’ll find that if you just ignore all the über-trendy “food” piling up in your fridge and spend a few weeks unplugging from the breakfast-lunch-dinner treadmill, your cells will feel a lot less pressure to keep catabolizing organic matter to synthesize substances needed to maintain their structure and preserve biological homeostasis.  (Possible story idea for Bill Keller:  “Is Not Dying Making Us Stupid?”)

“Some cooks who think nothing of grilling a whole chicken or decorating a three-layer cake are daunted, even defeated, by regularly getting a vegetable dish on the table.”  A whole chicken!  That could be as much as 5, even 5.5 pounds!  Assuming these cooks can also make a bowl of cereal and boil an egg, vegetables are the only missing link in their repertoire.  They should have gotten into produce management earlier.  If you start small, and incorporate manageable amounts of vegetables into your culinary training, pretty soon you’ll be transforming them into substances humans can eat.  For instance, maybe once you’re proficient enough to ice a one-layer cake, learn to cut a tomato in half.  When you’re up to two layers and can grill a whole quail or Cornish game hen, work on placing a sliced tomato in a bowl with some chopped lettuce and mushrooms to create a simple “salad”.  Before you know it you’ll be “cooking” vegetables through such methods as boiling, microwaving, and heating up in a pan with some olive oil, just like with real food!

But as it stands, even élite chefs are faltering.  “In a 2009 survey of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Americans ate no more vegetables than they did in 2000, despite all the public education about the benefits of a plant-based diet.”   People.  Did we learn nothing from that time when the government publicly educated everyone to eat lots of bread and margarine, and everyone did, and now everyone’s radiantly healthy and gorgeous?  All kidding aside, Americans won’t even use eco-friendly lightbulbs without having a meltdown; what makes you think they’re going to “embrace a plant-based diet” just because the government told them to?

This nutritional shortcoming also persists “despite the availability of a far greater variety of vegetables.”   Well, that’s part of the problem.   There are already too many kinds of vegetables in the produce section, sowing confusion and freaking out consumers.  If people don’t want knobbly piles and dirt-caked clusters in the home, what makes you think they’re gong to like them any better at the store?  “Mabel, take a gander at this thing.  What is that, a kombucha?”   “I reckon it’s one a them ‘quinoas’ I heer’d tell of.”  No, if we want people to eat this stuff, we should limit the variety to the following kinds : tomatoes, lettuce, spinach (“hippie lettuce”), onions, cucumbers, garlic (“miniature onions”), zucchini (“ethnic cucumbers”), potatoes (not the weird kind), and beets (canned ones — just take them out of the cans to make them seem “fresh”).

This is basically the curlicue light bulb of foods. I’m not paying some socialist farmer for a bunch of stupid leaves!

“A market research firm, the NPD Group, says Americans eat an average of a little more than a cup of vegetables a day and a little more than a half-cup of fruit, or about a quarter of what the government recommends.”   I hate to poke fun at the government, like a gross Libertarian, but they’re always so crestfallen when people don’t follow their recommendations.  “Don’t you remember, we told you guys to go vegan.  We used a really cool euphemism, though.  You haven’t forgotten, have you?  It was right before we turned Iraq into a pile of rubble, suffered a massive economic collapse, and almost voted to default on 14.3 trillion dollars’ worth of debt.  Why don’t you ever listen to us?”

Six to 11 servings of carbs?! Now there’s an intimidating tableau of anxiety.

Ronna Welsh, the food educator, has the solution.  “To help her students truly embrace vegetables, Ms. Welsh says that she has learned to address kitchen psychology along with cooking skills.”  Kitchen psychology is even less of a real subject than “produce management.”  If you call your parents and tell them you want to study kitchen psychology, they’ll be like “Honey, I thought we agreed you were going to major in Produce Management.  Your father and I just want you to have the best education you can get.  We’d hate for the money we’ve spent on preposterous Brooklyn self-actualization workshops to go to waste.  Do you want to end up at McDonald’s, trying to reverse-psychologize people into ordering a side of fries?”

“Less-experienced cooks have a persistent sense of responsibility toward the expensive, carefully raised produce that they buy and the corresponding feeling of guilt when that produce isn’t used to its full potential.”  Affluent New Yorkers:  They’ll hire nannies to raise their kids, but feel “responsible” and “guilty” over a turnip.  Forget everything I just said about food psychology, I need that class.

“’There are all these expectations to perform complicated tasks that they have no training in,’ she said. ‘They are set up for crushing failure.’”  Then again, maybe these people should leave parenting to the nannies.  I’m surprised they manage to reproduce without eating the Astroglide and impregnating each others’ nasal cavities.

“In the face of vegetable anxiety, what’s an aspiring omnivore to do?”  I’ve heard of a lot of aspirational lifestyle choices, but “aspiring” to eat a squash that cost $1 a pound at the farmer’s market is the saddest one yet.  Forget Super Size Me and Julie & Julia, the next blog-turned-bestseller-turned-movie will be about a guy who spends every day for an entire year trying to eat vegetables he already owns.  Me and Michael Pollan ?  Super-Antioxidize Me?  Fenugreek 9/11?  Eat, Cook, Complain?

“Already-cooked vegetables are the key to a refrigerator filled with usable, tamed ingredients…. Raw, they are just slouching toward rot.”  Great attitude.  I’d love to hear Julia Moskin’s take on humanity’s struggle to attain meaning in an indifferent universe.

Another harbinger off crushing failure is boiling and steaming, methods that Herbivoraceous author Michael Natkin condemns as boring.  “To stay away from that watery rut, he keeps a list of verbs on his computer screen (sear, purée, sauté, grill) as a reminder.”  Like, as his desktop background, or….  maybe it’s on a screensaver?  a post-it stuck on his screen?  written in 46-point type in a Word document that he keeps open at all times?  Every method I can think of for keeping a list of food verbs constantly on your computer screen is odder and more laborious than just remembering how to cook.

But applying heat to the vegetables isn’t the only roadblock; first you have to cut them up.  “It’s that need for technical support that prompted the installation of a full-time ‘vegetable butcher’ at Eataly when that glamorous food emporium opened in the Flatiron district in 2010: an employee whose sole job is to trim, peel and cut produce to order.”  Sure, they’re calling it a “vegetable butcher” now, but isn’t that the same job Sarge was always making Beetle Bailey do as a punishment?  This prestigiously titled K.P. guru is going to go power-mad and start insisting she’s selling you “aubergine steaks” and “courgette charcuterie.”  She’s going to refer to tomato seeds as “offal” and insist you’d like them if you tried them in pâté.  The New York foodie scene is really getting out of hand.  But I hear that lady’s celeriac bacon is to die for.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have this viewpoint:  “’Among people my age, vegetables were a punch line,’ said Harry Rosenblum, 35, an owner of the Brooklyn Kitchen in Williamsburg.”

They’re plants. They grow in the ground. You eat them. “What a fucking joke!”  I thought humans’ obsession with caloric energy was dorky, but photosynthesizing sunlight into the chemical compounds used to fuel all aerobic life on Earth?  Why don’t you just drive yourself to the farmer’s market on a Segway?

“‘If you think about it, an onion is a sphere.’”

I tried to think about it, but I accidentally attained Zen enlightenment.  My plant-induced troubles are over!

Overview

Likelihood that trend exists: 0/10

Importance of trend in grand scheme of things: 0/10

Adherence to trend piece formula: 4/10 (no statistics, no credibility)

Best aspect of author’s writing style:  Ability to empathize with even the most degraded and contemptible specimens of humanity

Suggestions for improving author’s writing style: Meet some people who don’t live in Brooklyn

New York Times editorialists are ready to give it to them.  And for most, that can mean only one thing.  For “freedom” to be a worthwhile concept, it has to be paradoxical in some way.  Like, maybe it’s simultaneously the best and the worst thing that ever happened to humanity…or maybe every advance in freedom perversely contains the seeds of un-freedom within itself.  Or wait, check this out.  What if “freedom” is an aporetic cultural space always in the process of deconstructing itself, thus showing itself to be a logocentric construct engaged in a futile rhetorical attempt to deny its own self-referentiality and ontological hollowness?  Yeah, that’s more like it!  Now you’re thinking like an intellectual!  This scholarly tradition of thinking weird thoughts about freedom has many instantiations, but for a conveniently recent example, we can turn to Kurt Andersen’s “The Downside of Liberty,” published this Independence Day.  In the essay Andersen, a novelist, explains how 60s ideals of social equality caused rampant social inequality.

He begins thus:  “This spring I was on a panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival. An audience member asked a question: Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts — women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll — but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time?”

I know what you’re thinking:  “That is a complex question, to which a multifaceted answer is required.  Any response must account for the existence of an entrenched system of government that rewards politicians who can please wealthy donors, thus ensuring economic reforms that benefit the less fortunate are never enacted.  It should also consider the ideology shared by Americans — our desire to believe that poverty can be overcome with nothing more than hard work and grit.  After all, it’s easy to see the injustice of sexism and racism, while naïvely believing that income inequality could be solved if only those darn poor people would work harder.  Further complicating matters, the people calling for greater rights are rarely the same individuals as those demanding laissez-faire economics and tax cuts for the rich; the reason a political party might succeed with one part of their program but not another are multifarious….”  Blah, blah, blah.  You’re just a typical American for thinking like that.  You fall back on the whole “life is complicated” thing to preserve your pro-freedom bias, whereas if you could just understand the paradoxicality of the American weltenschauung, you wouldn’t be worried about the supposed intricacies of history.

Kick all that complexity to the curb.  Nuance, as practiced by the New York Times editorialist, is the enemy of the complex.  Thus Andersen didn’t need to go through the elaborate though process indicated in the previous paragraph, and it’s a good thing he was there to save the day.  “I had an epiphany, which I offered, bumming out everybody in the room.”  Humblebrag alert!  If someone had an epiphany, and it depressed that many people, it must be nuanced as hell.

“What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.”

This makes perfect sense.  The Bush tax cuts are an example of extreme individualism, but so are women’s rights (what do women have in common? they’re all individuals), gay rights (like women’s lib except more so, because gay people are eccentric), sex (you’re having sex with whoever you want, instead of letting the community have a say), drugs (which are legal now), rock ‘n’ roll (form of music dedicated to liberating women and gays, as evinced by such protest anthems as “Brown Sugar: Boycott Products of Industrial Colonialism” and “Wang Dang, Sweet Marriage Equality”), and ecology (hipsters who just want to look cool like Al Gore while they ride their bicycles to the recycling center; if they get their way, our children won’t have any gas stations or Wal-Marts to work in).  Don’t even get me started on that black president.  How selfish can you be?  A black man sees a plum job that pays $600,000 a year, and immediately has to have it for himself.  Living in a mansion, being driven around by chauffeurs, giving free health care away to millions of people, some of whom are black — they’re all part of Barack Obama’s me-first lifestyle.

“From the beginning, the American idea embodied a tension between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal. The document we’re celebrating today says in its second line that axiomatic human rights include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — individualism in a nutshell.”  Yes.  Pursuing happiness is only possible in a radically individualist worldview in which society is meaningless and human connection doesn’t exist.  I mean, how am I supposed to enjoy myself with a bunch of undesirables around?  You know who I’m talking about.

“But the Declaration’s author was not a greed-is-good guy: ‘Self-love,’ Jefferson wrote to a friend 38 years after the Declaration, ‘is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.’”  He sounds pretty conflicted.  One day he’s all like, “be free and pursue happiness,” and then another day, 38 years later, he’s all “don’t violate your moral duties to others.”  Make up your mind!  It’s almost like Thomas Jefferson didn’t think there was a huge paradox between being a free citizen and a useful part of a community.  The apparent lack of tension between the two ideas just makes them all the more tense, like estranged lovers trading icy smiles and strained banter at a cocktail party.  Yes, at the center of the DNA of the American Idea is Jefferson’s 38-year struggle between being happy, and not being an inconsiderate jackass.

“Periodically Americans have gone overboard indulging our propensities to self-gratification — during the 1840s, during the Gilded Age, and again in the Roaring Twenties. Yet each time, thanks to economic crises and reassertions of moral disapproval, a rough equilibrium between individualism and the civic good was restored.”  Well, that sums up that 190 years of American history.  And without reading a single book!  If you follow Andersen’s math, you can see that between the 1770s and the 1960s, there were 16 “good” decades (during which most Americans were busy earning a living, raising kids, doing housework and spending time with loved ones) and only three “bad” decades.  Human nature was 81 percent good!  What went wrong?

Let’s look at the transition in more detail.  “Consider America during the two decades after World War II…. Just as beatniks were rare and freakish, so were proudly money-mad Ayn Randian millionaires… Sex outside marriage was shameful, beards and divorce were outré — but so were boasting of one’s wealth and blaming unfortunates for their hard luck.”  Well, now I’m torn.  I value individualism and beards, but I can’t dismiss Andersen’s point without doing extensive research on the relationship between the beatnik movement and Ayn Rand. {Does extensive research}  Hey guys, I just found out that in the two decades after World War II, Vibram 5-Finger shoes were almost nonexistent.  That does it, I’m going back to the 50s!

“My conservative Republican father thought marginal income tax rates of 91 percent were unfairly high, but he and his friends never dreamed of suggesting they be reduced below, say, 50 percent.”  Your father sounds like a truly selfless person.  I mean, a Republican in the 50′s, and he didn’t want marginal tax rates on people like him to be reduced by more than 40 percentage points?!  Let’s not set our standards too high.  I’m sure a list of things Kurt Andersen’s father never dreamed of suggesting (cunnilingus, white caddies at a golf course, vegetable dishes other than succotash) would be enlightening indeed.

“When I was growing up in Omaha…”

You know whatever comes after this is going to be amazing.  Sometimes I’m reading the front page and I think to myself, It’s all too depressing.  Wars, jihads, Joe Paterno, climate change.  There has to be an answer, I say to myself.  If only a baby boomer would share some anecdotes about his childhood in Omaha, surely the world could be healed.

“…rich people who could afford to build palatial houses did not and wouldn’t dream of paying themselves 200 or 400 times what they paid their employees.”  This is truly an inspiration to contemplate.  A bunch of conservative Nebraskans, tactfully refraining from taking any more than the bare minimum they needed for a mansion, servants, two late-model cars and (I assume) a vacation home.  Just like the Native Americans used every part of the buffalo, the traditional Omahan used every part of the palatial home.  It’s like a real-life Real Housewives of Omaha, except realer.  Please tell me there’s a memoir in the works.

“Greed as well as homosexuality was a love that dared not speak its name.”  And I know which one of them I’d rather have around.  I mean, at least investment bankers have the decency not to carve those annoying holes in the walls of bathroom stalls.

“But then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed.”  People were wearing assless chaps and growing beards at an incredible rate, and for some reason, this caused politicians to vote in ever lower tax rates for the wealthy, even though it wasn’t the politicians themselves who were wearing the assless chaps.  It was a kind of hedonism contact high, or secondhand depravity.

“Going forward, the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium.”  It reached its apex on January 21st, 2010, when the Supreme court took a break from an enormous gay pride orgy/marijuana rave/Take Back the Night rally to rule that corporations are people.

“People on the political right have blamed the late ’60s for what they loathe about contemporary life — anything-goes sexuality, cultural coarseness, multiculturalism. And people on the left buy into that, seeing only the ’60s legacies of freedom that they define as progress. But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967.”  Yes.  You see, the U.S. is like a big libertarian coin.  There’s a pot leaf and a condom on one side, Ted Nugent shooting a gun on the other side.  The coin is made of hemp, because it was minted in the 60′s.  It has no monetary value.  The hippies destroyed our currency!

“Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.”  But thanks to the 90s, we’re too slacker-y to do anything about it.  And thanks to the 70s and 80s, we all have lots of pet rocks and Frankie Goes to Hollywood cassette tapes.  Maybe it’s not selfishness that’s the problem, but the existence of decades.  If we could return to the gold standard and institute a binary calendrical numbering system, all our problems would be solved!

Despite the limpid clarity of Andersen’s ideas, he was still forced to explain himself to obtuse members of the public.  Thus this tweet:

Are “good” and “bad” selfishness like “good” and “bad” cholesterol? Maybe if Americans eat more olive oil, we can lower our levels of “bad” selfishness and reduce our risk of arterial plaque, which in this analogy is equivalent to reckless dismantling of the social safety net.  Although I’m still worried about our triglycerides (drone strikes against civilians).

As Andersen’s editorial and tweets prove, we as a society can’t expect to become “free” from racism, sexism and homophobia without paying a terrible cost.  But freedom comes in many forms, each with their own terrifyingly inevitable side effects. National I.D. cards are one example:  Many Americans oppose them.  Who wants to be tracked by some sinister Big Brother-like entity?  Perhaps the real question is, who wouldn’t want to?  After all, we don’t know what we’re missing out on by not requiring them, as Bill Keller explains in “Show Me Your Papers.”  Keller is the former executive editor of the Times, and a regular columnist.  He has drawn criticism for lending support to the Iraq war, but his opinion was shared by “a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations, including, among others, Thomas Friedman,” plus he “wanted to be on the side of doing something,” and besides, he was a dad: “I remember a mounting protective instinct, heightened by the birth of my second daughter.”  You’re not going to get mad at a dad for being protective, are you?  Anyway, despite any previous errors in judgment, he has the one single qualification necessary for high-profile, elite journalism:  The ability to get lots of articles on the “most e-mailed” and “most blogged about” list.

In this frequently-blogged-about piece, Keller writes that “this country, unlike many other developed democracies, does not require a national identification card, because the same electorate that is so afraid America is being overrun by illegal aliens also fears that we are one short step away from becoming a police state.”  Another paradox!  When will you electorates stop holding completely contradictory opinions?  And don’t give me that line about different members of the electorate disagreeing with each other.  That old excuse.  “I don’t live in xenophobic terror of race-mixing, it was someone else!”

Keller suggests “Americans should master their anxieties about a national identification card.”  He continues, “I understand that the idea of a national ID comes with some chilling history…. Opponents associate national identification cards with the Nazi roundups, the racial sorting of apartheid South Africa, the evils of the Soviet empire. Civil rights groups see in a national ID — especially one that might be required for admission to the voting booth — a shadow of the poll taxes and literacy tests used to deter black voters in the Jim Crow South. More recently, accounts of flawed watch-list databases and rampant identity theft feed fears for our privacy. The most potent argument against an ID is that the government — or some hacker — might access your information and use it to mess with your life.”

Wow, that all sounds pretty convincing.  On the opposing side, “on the subject of privacy, we are an ambivalent nation. Americans — especially younger Americans, who swim in a sea of shared information — are casual to the point of recklessness about what we put online.”  This fact tips the balance in favor of the national ID: You can’t just go around putting all your information out there promiscuously, then say no when someone wants you to put other, different information out there!  Sure, Nazis are bad, and Jim Crow sucked, but consider this:  Everyone already knows that you had a mushroom panini for lunch, and you loved Moonrise Kingdom.  So you’ll share all that with your friends of friends, but not with an all-powerful centralized authority?  I think you’re being just a little hypocritical, and, frankly, kind of a tease.  Besides, “the only way to completely eliminate the risks of a connected world is to burn your documents, throw away your cellphone, cancel your Internet service and live off the grid.”  If you’ve already done that, and you’re reading this blog post in the library after a morning of canning wild game in your cabin or whatever (??), screw you!  You’re even worse than the Facebook people.  What’s the point of being so obsessed with privacy?  It’s fringe-y and offputting, and besides, you haven’t considered the flaw in your plan:  If the U.S. adopts a national ID card, you won’t even be able to vote.

Maybe ID cards aren’t the biggest threat to freedom.  What about authoritarianism?  Blind obedience to an authority figure — whether demanded by a government or freely granted by citizens — is surely one of the most chilling assaults on human liberty.  Unless the authority in question is someone truly worthy, like the President of the USA.  No, not Barack Obama.  A real president, like Jefferson or Lincoln.  In “The Follower Problem,” David Brooks writes that “if you go to the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials in Washington, you are invited to look up in admiration. Lincoln and Jefferson are presented as the embodiments of just authority. They are strong and powerful but also humanized. Jefferson is a graceful aristocratic democrat. Lincoln is sober and enduring.”  James K. Polk is stern and powerful, but with a hint of sensuality in his delicate, long-fingered hands.  William Henry Harrison is massive and rugged — like a comforting father figure who won’t punish you unless you really need to learn a lesson.  Grover Cleveland is boyish, but with the taut,  muscular pecs of a man.

But you won’t find any mouthwatering hunks of man in today’s memorials.  “The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial transforms a jaunty cavalier into a ‘differently abled and rather prim nonsmoker.’”  Yeah! Why should the p.c. police make a statue of FDR in a wheelchair, just because he spent his entire adult life in a wheelchair?  Although, he’s not President Barbie; he doesn’t need to be posed with all his favorite props and accessories.  If every president were memorialized doing the most politically incorrect thing they ever did, the Thomas Jefferson memorial would be very controversial indeed.

On a more general note, “the monuments that get built these days are mostly duds. That’s because they say nothing about just authority. The World War II memorial is a nullity. It tells you nothing about the war or why American power was mobilized to fight it.”  That information isn’t exactly obscure, though.  Is it really the monument’s job to be giving remedial Social Studies lessons?  Its website says it was intended to “commemorate the sacrifice and celebrate the victory,” so perhaps that’s why it failed to do the completely different think Brooks wanted it to do.  Maybe they should get rid of that dumb fountain and have a statue of a nude, muscular FDR bench-pressing Hitler and stomping Emperor Hirohito into the ground.

Artist’s conception: Revised and edited WWII Memorial

But Brooks’s real question is, “why can’t today’s memorial designers think straight about just authority?”  And he has an answer:  It’s because “we live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power. Most of the stories we tell ourselves are about victims who have endured oppression, racism and cruelty.”  Goddamn fuckin’ stories about victims of oppression!  Why must we be subjected to this hegemonic discursive regime that’s constantly constructing narratives in which oppression and racism exist?  As noted deconstructionist David “Derrida” Brooks is all too well aware, we create the reality around us through our linguistic tropes.  So, if we dismantle our narratives about victimization, and construct new narratives about rugged cowboys who ride in on a horse and solve everything, all our troubles will be over!  It’s like Discipline and Punish, crossed with The Secret.  (Or, as Brooks should title the inevitable New York Times bestseller, Bobos in the Panopticon).

Anyway, power is a paradox, because great men have to strive for individual greatness but use it in the service of the little people.  “These days many Americans seem incapable of thinking about these paradoxes. Those ‘Question Authority’ bumper stickers no longer symbolize an attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority. They symbolize an attitude of opposing authority.”  Or maybe they symbolize an attitude of… questioning authority?  Psychoanalyzing people’s bumper stickers strikes me a a lazy way to figure out what’s going on in their minds.  I hope David Brooks never fills in for Thomas Friedman, or his column will start out “When I was in Cairo during the insurrection, I found myself stuck in traffic on the way to the airport.  Impatient, I happened to notice the bumper sticker of the cab in front of me: ‘If You Can Read This, You Are Too Close.’  This illustrates something I’ve noticed more and more lately.  For the technologically savvy youth of the Arab democracy revolutions, being ‘close’ to one’s fellow citizens is a mixed blessing, at best.  Houston, we have a problem.  Egypt’s young people are turning the lemonade of global communication into the lemons of alienation and social atomization.”  Et cetera.

Because of these rebellious bumper stickers, “you end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.”  Stupid Wall Street Occupiers, standing around in a park, meeting people face to face and having heartfelt conversations about the issues that matter to them!  Can’t they see that that’s just like the Internet?

“To have good leaders you have to have good followers — able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it. Those skills are required for good monument building, too.”  The idea that one should stop questioning one’s leaders and cultivate the “skill” of being grateful to them is an intriguing one.  But I think Brooks might have plagiarized it from that one part in Jane Eyre where a saintly little girl befriends Jane at boarding school, then dies of Scarlet Fever.

“When I’m gone, Jane… never forget… offshore hiring is essential to a robust American dynamism.”

But the problem isn’t just with followers being bad at following.  In “Why Our Elites Stink,” Brooks suggests there’s a problem with leaders, too.  It’s not that they abandon their ideals.  Instead, “I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.”  Poor people don’t work very much, which is why they don’t make much money.  If someone makes minimum wage, it’s because they work the minimum amount (one nanosecond per week).  Poor people’s kids have to take the bus to a piano instruction facility so crappy, it doesn’t even have a waiting room.

“The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.”  I’ve never noticed before how much I hate the conjunction “but.”  It’s like you can take two ideas that are opposed in some way, stick them together with a “but,” and whichever one comes last somehow sounds more important.  It gets results, too.  Do a Twitter search for David Brooks, and you’ll find a million dingbats like these who seem genuinely enthused by the wit and wisdom of his latest opus.

And it’s not just the young people and sassy Arabs who are doing it:  The populist threat can come from anywhere.  Matthew Bishop, a Bureau Chief for The Economist, makes this clear in a review of Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now!  Bishop likes some of Krugman’s ideas, but he had some issues with the book.  “Longtime readers of Krugman will know there are at least two of him. One is the gifted winner of the Nobel in economic science, respected throughout the academy for his mastery of the dismal science; the other, the populist polemicist and baiter of the right who writes columns in The New York Times. ‘End This Depression Now!’ is a collaborative effort by the two Krugmen.” This makes him a sort of sinister Jekyll and Hyde, a highfalutin’ scientist who condescends to share his ideas directly with the unwashed masses and try to persuade people of things using words.  That guy is even more conflicted than Thomas Jefferson!”Professor Krugman usefully contributes plenty of mainstream economics in support of his stimulus plan and in order to debunk the idea that austerity policies in today’s circumstances can boost an economy by increasing confidence….Yet no opportunity to preach to the choir is missed by the populist Mr. Krugman, nor any chance to mock those he calls the ‘Very Serious People’ who disagree with him…. The book’s preachiness gives those politicians and economists who most need to read this book an easy excuse to ignore it.  Krugman seems to have given up on directly influencing policy makers and mainstream economists, opting instead to appeal over their heads to ‘an informed public.’”  If this so-called “public” is so “informed,” how come they’re reading an economics book that just tells them more about stuff they were already interested in?  They claim to be interested in the issues, but then it turns out they already have opinions about the issues!  Now it just seems like everyone’sconflicted.  This whole enterprise is fraught with conflicts of interest.  Has anyone asked the Ethicist whether it’s ethical to write books?As you can see, a number of problems have arisen since we decided to give people all these rights.  They use them to promote their own agendas.  They use them to question their leaders and write know-it-all tweets.  They use them to read books and decide some beliefs are better than others.  Their natural-born leaders, elite intellectuals, even take advantage of this state of affairs by communicating directly with them!  But there’s one thing even more horrifying than all the rest:  If we’re all equal, we won’t be different enough.  Or maybe we will be, but we won’t be able to tell.That’s the theme of a humorous humorous “Room for Debate” on whether today’s men are manly enough.  You might inquire whether there is, indeed, “room for debate” about whether humans are expressing their gender in a crowd-pleasing enough manner, but that’s because you forgot the beginning of this post.  Conducting your personal life however you want isn’t an innocent choice; it determines the economic policy of the entire nation.  Furthermore, some choices are intensely displeasing to Joel Stein, columnist for Time and author of “Men Need to Rediscover the Don Draper Within.”

“Your dad was manlier than you. His dad was manlier than him. And so on, for all of history back to the Stone Age.”   If that’s the case, the 1800s were a huge fluke.  Condragulations to mankind for getting back on track after that one!

Although come to think of it, most of history is a chronicle of men getting away with wearing dresses by inventing creative names.  It’s like, right, that’s a “toga.”  And you’re not carrying a  purse, it’s a satchel for your wax tablets.  Let me guess, you live in a democracy.  I kind of wish Klein could actually travel back to the Stone Age, so he could witness cavemen eating raw organ meat, dancing, wearing fur, using locally sourced artisanal housewares, and painting the insides of their caves.  He’d be like “these guys are fags,” and they’d be like “Grok hate!  This guy no can hang.  Least fun ever.”

“I’m thrilled with technology, the Enlightenment and feminism.”  I’m glad Stein approves, although he’s so deadpan, he sounds like he’s talking about some gentrification on his block that increased property values.  Indeed, as when a pilates studio and a new cheese shop open in the neighborhood and suddenly it’s hard to find parking, these thrilling developments came with their own downside.  “With all those improvements we lost a little self-reliance, some ability to protect – some manliness. And no matter how many hoodied nerds become masters of the virtual universe, without manliness we’re going to die as a species. Because being a nerd will never get you any action.”  Playing video games is just a fantasy of masculinity and power.  If we want to get anywhere, we need to make people want to be manly be presenting them with idealized images of masculinity and power!

“Sure, you could be progressive and buy your son a doll.  But he’ll thank you if you’re more old school and teach him to hunt.”  I get the feeling that if I do both, Joel Stein’s head will explode.  Well, guess what:  I’m going to teach him to render his own leaf lard and collect vintage brocades.  He’s going watch Les Miserables while ice fishing in Alaska and wear lamé jumpsuits to NASCAR races.  He’ll do cross-stitches of himself wrestling a grizzly bear.  Sure, maybe he’ll be an unwilling poster boy for a contrived point I want to make about gender relations, but at least he’ll be a hit a parties.

“I got messed up by my feminist mom in the 1970s, who taught me that gender was a social construct. I can’t believe that social experiment went on as long as it did, since it’s clear by month six of having a child that William does not want a doll. Ladies do go first. We are not free to be you and me.”  Now that you mention it, I’m tired of hearing that timely catchphrase “free to be you and me” everywhere I go.  It’s worse than “#YOLO.”   Everyone knows it’s just propaganda for enforcing a radically gender-neutral state in which masculinity is forbidden.  And don’t even get me started on the anti-white bias in Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Why does it have to be a white seagull?

“We are born different.”  Yeah!  But only between genders.  Within genders, everybody’s pretty much interchangeable.  “As soon as my son was old enough to crawl, he pulled a jar of mustard from the pantry and pushed it around the floor making car noises. We bought him a closetful of stuffed animals, but he sleeps with a Matchbox car clutched to his face.”  Boys and girls have inborn tendencies to have more or less of certain traits.  It just makes sense to increase these differences as much as possible, by yelling at men to be more manly.  (Girls who aren’t very girly can become sexy bartenders or mechanics.)  If we remind people that they’re born different often enough, maybe they’ll acquire some self-respect.  Our natural human inborn innate characteristics aren’t just gonna manifest themselves, you know.

“We can’t solve this man-crisis by sitting on a couch watching ‘Ice Road Truckers.’  We’ve got to start fixing our own toilets, exercising outside at 6 a.m. and hunting the meat that we cowardly eat from far crueler factory farms. “  Yeah, fix your own stuff and hunt your own food!  Fuck the division of labor!  Joel Stein condescended to approve of the Enlightenment, but he didn’t say anything about agriculture, mercantilism or the Industrial Revolution.

And there you have it.  What began as an innocent question about the granoly-y legacy of the sixties is revealed as something much vaster:  A critique of the very notions of civilization and human progress themselves.  With every social change, things are different, which is risky, because it means they’re not identical to how they were before.  It’s alarming to contemplate future change, but change that’s already happened is even worse in a way, because you can’t go back and experience what it was like when things were normal, before the hippies and non-hunter-gatherers ruined things.  In the process of giving “freedom” to the women, gays and black presidents, we’ve robbed ourselves of perhaps the most precious freedom of all:  The freedom to not know what it’s like to experience freedom.  Now that’s a paradox worthy of the Opinion page.

You look in the mirror, and notice your skin isn’t looking very radiant.  You want to look younger, eliminate wrinkles and clogged pores, and have softer, more supple skin than ever. What do you do?

If you said Botox, you get a 0.  A real Style section reader would already be getting Botox treatments every week.  You should be Botoxed to the max.  Botox isn’t like spin class — you can’t get better results by going three times a day.  Think outside the Botox!  (I’m the first person to think of that Botox-related play on words, right?)

If you said anything about lasers, 1 point.  Using lasers suggests you’re willing to put in the effort, but come on, this isn’t the 90s. I suppose you’re also still conflicted about the ethical implications of Napster.  It’s 2012!  You should be seeking an all-natural, organic way to defy the aging process forever.

If you said yoga, you get 2 points.  Yoga is renowned for promoting relaxation and health, but it will also kill you.  “Live slow, die young, leave a beautiful corpse,” that’s the yogi’s motto.  It’s not worth the risk!

If your answer involves nutricosmetics, cosmiceuticals, collagen marshmallows or phytonutrient-enhanced vodka, you’re getting warmer!  3 points.  These are all great, prestige-enhancing ways to preserve your youthful appearance, but they’ve been around since the dawn of time (2010).  If they worked, everyone would look great already, and cosmepreneurs would have stopped inventing new skincare breakthroughs.  You don’t see that happening, do you?

Did you guess “bird poop”?  Good job!  You score 4 points and, in an ideal world, would win a dream date with the Fat Radish guys.  For those who didn’t get it right away, I hope you now realize why this answer makes perfect sense.  Bird poop enters the beauty arena with all the surprise, shock and horror of the new.   And it’s not just birds — all animal species are hot right now.  While plants basically sit in one place all day photosynthesizing and being inert, animals are unpredictable.  They’re constantly on the go, crawling or flying around, pooping and emitting various (presumably therapeutic) slimes and venoms, trying to sting you and infect you with malaria.  Or is it malaria?  Maybe it’s a moisture-infusing bioactive compound!  Sure, most products of animal glands and orifices look revolting, but that’s just an evolutionary adaptation.  It’s designed to protect organisms from the more appearance-conscious members of the ecosystem.  Just as nuts have shells (to stop foraging mammals from using them as hair serum) and cactuses have thorns (to discourage grazers from turning them into antioxidant-infused tequila), birds, reptiles and insects make their secretions extra-disgusting to prevent predators from harnessing their glowifying and anti-aging powers.  It’s nature’s way of saying “no pain, no gain.”

Yes, if the fountain of youth is ever to be found, it must be wrung from the living flesh of kingdom Animalia.  That’s why Alix Strauss writes, in “Fertilizer for the Face,” that “a recent Monday morning found me at Shizuka New York Day Spa in Midtown, getting the Geisha Facial.”  The Geisha facial is made from sterilized nightingale poop.  It is traditional, all-natural, “said to break down dead skin cells,” and most importantly, is in no way a metaphor for the absurdity of an advanced capitalist system that forces workers to perform demeaning tasks at subsistence wages while allowing capitalists to reap the rewards of their labor by transforming worthless “commodities” into fetishized luxury goods that can be sold to bourgeois consumers at inflated prices.  That’s ridiculous, how could you even think something so immature.  (However, it is ironic that rich ladies are paying to put doo-doo on their faces.)

“The treatment, I was told by Asako Nunose, the aesthetician, originated centuries ago when Japanese entertainers damaged their skin from the high lead level in their white makeup. As a remedy, they used a mask containing nightingale droppings.”  It just makes sense:  The people best qualified to advise you on preventing skin damage are the people who ruined their skin by smearing lead on it in the first place.   It’s like how AA sponsors are always former alcoholics, or Republicans have the best plans for fixing the deficit, or Medieval alchemists always had lots of base metals around needing to be transformed into gold.

“For this modernized hourlong version, which costs $180, the excrement is sanitized under ultraviolet light, then mixed with rice bran, an exfoliant and brightener.”   This is a very “stone soup” approach to  sanitized excrement.  Throw some Oil of Olay in there, and it might actually work!

“Because the poop contains guanine, a nucleobase, it supposedly shines the skin as well.” Thanks for not taking the time to explain what a “nucleobase” is.  Since all readers of the Style section have advanced degrees in biochemistry and are extremely busy, it would be a waste of our time to read extra words.  However, I am confused by the statement that the masque “shines” the skin.  Is that another technical term?  Because my skin isn’t a patent leather boot, plus I don’t want it to look shiny.  Once your skin is shined, do you have to apply a mattifier made from ragweed pollen?

“I was calm as Ms. Nunose explained all of this while applying the poop powder, prepared and flown in from Japan.”  Yes, Japan, exotic land of mystery.  You didn’t think they were going to use boring old American bird poop, did you?  I can’t decide whether to be relieved or disappointed that this nascent industry isn’t providing jobs for U.S. workers.

“Then it brushed up against my lips and slipped into my mouth.”  It seems like for $180, at minimum, you should be guaranteed a dung-in-mouth-free application process.  I don’t want to cast doubt on this woman’s aesthetic prowess, but remind me never to get a Brazilian bikini wax from Asako Nunose.

“The next morning my skin did glow.”   Another triumph for nucleobases!  “’Though turning to animal ingredients isn’t the newest concept, it categorically popped out of nowhere,’ said Jeanine Recckio, of Mirror Mirror Imagination Group, which forecasts beauty trends. ‘Consumers are gravitating toward their exotic or shock appeal.’”  So conceptually they’re not new, but categorically, they are?  The lucidity of that statement is only matched by the flawless logic of the idea that people are buying something because they “gravitate toward” it.   However opaque, this theory of consumer motivation occurs with surprising frequency in the Times archives.  For instance, “many of Brazil’s creative types gravitate to Rio,” and biker jacket wearers “gravitated toward authentic American models from Harley-Davidson and Avirex.”  “Those with the money to collect [art in New York] often gravitate toward traditional landscapes and portraits,”  while buyers at an art auction gravitated toward “quintessential” works by George Moore and Juan Le Gris.  You never hear about people “gravitating toward” payday loans, or riding the bus.  My theory is that trend gravitation only affects the more prosperous among us, because their wallets have more mass.

“Some of these consumers are famous, like the Duchess of Cornwall and Gwyneth Paltrow, who have reportedly tried the Bee Venom mask, the creation of Deborah Mitchell, a beauty specialist. According to promotional literature, bee venom is said to freeze muscles, creating a Botox-like effect.”  So far we’ve heard the phrases “is said to,” “supposedly,” and “according to promotional literature.”  Not to discount the wisdom of Dr. Passivevoice Tryingtosellsomething, but until they can prove it really works, I’m just going to keep eating dehydrated bear gallbladders.

“And Mel Gibson has acknowledged using cow brains, or selegiline, a smelly yellow ointment that, in other forms, is used to treat Parkinson’s disease and depression. In his case, he has said that ‘it cleans the neurotransmitters and sharpens mental focus.’”  Coming from a mentally sharp individual like Mel, that means a lot.  Does it just clean the neurotransmitters, or does it plump and shine them, too?  I feel like my neurotransmitters are starting to look old.

“Cosmeceutical brands, which include biologically active ingredients like those derived from animals, were the fastest-growing segment of the prestige skin-care market in 2011.  Perhaps this is because some people trying high-tech ingredients (like peptides or StriVectin) or stem-cell technology or even purportedly natural and organic products have been disappointed.”  What have I been telling you?  You can’t expect something to work just because it’s new and exotic.  Thank God people are finally learning, and playing it safe with brand-new remedies that haven’t been disproven yet.

“’People discovered organic didn’t always mean organic, and marketed naturals could be harmful to one’s skin,’ said Dr. Joshua Zeichner, director of cosmetic and clinical research in the dermatology department at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. ‘Animal extracts are a new way of treating the skin, while offering a new definition of natural.’”  So the new definition is that it’s from…a different part of nature?  The part that’s made of animals instead of plants.   Meet the new definition, strikingly similar to the old definition.  Cosmeticeutical researchers, don’t quit your day jobs and become lexicographers.

“Wrinkle Butter with earthworm complex, a cream derived from earthworm excrement, went on the market at the end of December.”  I learned in elementary school that all dirt is worm poop, and that’s how dirt got there in the first place.  So, this company is selling dirt to people for $26.99.  Contemporary fiction writers, take note.  Your latest Gary Shteyngart-esque satire on the contemporary zeitgeist is going to have to feature a company selling antiaging dirt for even more money than this. I suggest using a memorable number, like $666.69.  Also, is there a more beautiful phrase in the English language than “Wrinkle Butter with Earthworm”?  Not yet, but just wait until I launch my revolutionary new product “Goiter Bacon with Brown Recluse Spider Complex.”

Nice font!

The company is planning “more earthworm-based product”; somebody else is making a synthetic snake venom skin cream called Syn-Ake.   “And last month, Dermelect Cosmeceuticals introduced its ME collection of anti-aging nail lacquers, an extension of its well-selling treatment line. The six polishes contain ProSina, a protein-peptide derived from New Zealand sheep’s wool, which, the company says, closely resembles protein found in nails.”  Oh sure, laugh all you want.  Right now, you don’t think you’ll ever need it, because you’re young.  You can just party all night and go off to work in the morning, and your nail beds will look as fresh and nubile as ever.  But let me tell you, it won’t always be that way.  Get a few more miles on the odometer, and all the cold cream in the world won’t hide the abuse you’ve put that cuticle area through.  Enjoy those perfect, unlined nails while you can.  I wish I had, believe me.  “Now of my threescore years and ten,/ Twenty will not come again,/ My nail beds look totally busted/ I feel like such a hag.”

If you’re not using this already, it’s probably too late.

“’For many, a plant or a completely organic product isn’t satisfactory to women who want healing properties and a solution to their problems,’ said Amos Lavian, founder of Dermelect Cosmeceuticals, who said he got the idea for the sheep’s wool from reading the New Zealand Journal of Medicine.”  Yeah, fuck plants!  So unsatisfactory.  I would love to know what Amos Lavian’s method for reading medical journals is.  Perhaps it involves looking up his lucky horoscope numbers for the day, then flipping to that page and turning whatever the article is about into a cosmeceutical.  Or maybe he just throws them down the stairs.  If he reads them cover to cover, that’s even worse.  “Complications of diabetes… boring… suicidal depression… who cares… testicular cancer, what a fucking joke…  dengue fever, cholera, intestinal parasites, blah blah blah, people in India are pussies… wait a minute, wombat earwax can shrink pores by 12%?!  This is huge!”

“‘We have very little data to know if those cosmetics work,’ Dr. Zeichner said. ‘Perhaps all they do is moisturize. But these animal ingredients have some medical research behind them. All we can do is to wait and see how well they work.’”  Yes… all we can do is wait.  As long as there’s a chance, no matter how small, that smearing dung and poison on your face might improve your appearance, we can’t afford not to give it a shot.  In a world crying out for answers, the greatest mistake… would be failing to act.

“Masque*ology, a new mask-based skin-care line developed in South Korea, whose Cell Renewal Mask contains snail secretion, recently arrived at Sephora.  ‘I’d been searching for an animal-extract product for a few years, but couldn’t find one that seemed legit,’ said Carolyn Bojanowski, Sephora’s director of skin-care merchandising. Independent vendors with homegrown concepts don’t have conglomerates behind them, she said, ‘which can mean they don’t have testing or stability, so the product can be sketchy.’”  Multinational conglomerates seem to get all the bad press, so I’m glad someone finally stuck up for them.   This reminds me of something, though.  Sketchiness… sinister corporation… slime… that’s it!  Company tricks consumers into eating ammonia-laced beef slime, has to lay off workers.  Company tricks consumers into putting snail slime on their faces, is hailed as “legit,” gets contract with Sephora.  Are you thinking what I’m thinking?  There’s gotta be some sort of dermal revitalizing effect of Lean Finely Textured Beef.  If we all just put pink slime on our faces and snail secretion in our hamburgers, we could save American jobs, solve the world’s food crisis, end the obesity epidemic and look 10 years younger!  Forget about cosmeceuticals and nutricosmetics, how about cosnutrimetics and nutricosmetrition?  This is genius!

World’s first beef-remnant-and-snail-based sandwich spread/hydrating masque!

“After a week of smearing snail secretion and snake and bee venom — the worm poop was a bit too hard to commit to — over my face and body, my pores looked slightly smaller, and my skin felt marginally softer and moisturized.”  A ringing endorsement.  Maybe the nucleobases in the snail secretion and the venom are opposites, and cancel each other out.   “It wasn’t the visual transformation I was hoping for — I still require Botox for the massive crease in my forehead — but I didn’t break out either.”   I guess in the end, it’s the simple things that matter.  We can go chasing rainbows, trying to keep up with the Joneses, “getting and spending” to acquire the latest technology, but in the end, nothing works better than good, ol’-fashioned Botox.

Overview

Likelihood that trend exists: 4/10

Importance of trend in grand scheme of things: 2/10

Adherence to trend piece formula: 7/10 (disappointed by failure to consider how current economic situation could impact consumer demand for animal-based skin products)

Best aspect of author’s writing style: Mentioned lots of cool animals

Suggestion for improving author’s writing style: Stop subjecting self to ridiculous scam “beauty treatments” in name of journalism

Yes, the world’s tradition of moral reasoning is indeed diverse.  Put it all in a blender with some whimsical self-deprecation, add water, and you’ve got the New York Times Ethicist column.  The Ethicist is a person who’s been appointed to solve moral dilemmas, and usually stumbles onto the right answer by sheer dumb luck or understanding of basic common courtesy.  The Ethicist has no training any tradition of ethics or philosophy, but figures that stuff has to trickle down, right?  Besides, we all understand ethics, like, intuitively!  My view of what’s ethical is no better than yours, maaaaaan.  As a result of this radical ceding of authority to the collective Weltanschauung, the Ethicist is sometimes phenomenally wrong-headed.

Despite this consistency of outlook, the Ethicist isn’t just one person.  Like the unfortunate sufferer whom Jesus cured of demon possession/bath salt-induced psychosis, the Ethicist’s name is Legion.  The Times has burned through six of them in the past year.  After Randy Cohen left to “pursue other opportunities” (this fascinating podcast, which I’m sure your teenage children can’t stop talking about), there was Ariel Kaminer, a stray reporter from the Metro section who spent a year at the job.  Kaminer came as a relief to us all by not cracking endless corny jokes, yet carried on Cohen’s legacy of not knowing anything about ethics, not claiming to be more ethical than anyone else, and not using ethical frameworks to answer people’s questions.

A typical sample of her work is the following:  A hotel customer found a bedbug in her room.  On her way out, she chatted by the luggage cart with a new arrival, and wants to know whether she should have told him about the bugs.  Kaminer responds, “As it turns out…you were right to hold your tongue. According to Michael Potter, a bedbug expert at the University of Kentucky, that lone bug you found doesn’t necessarily indicate any widespread infestation.”

Oh, is that what a “bedbug expert” told you?  Well, I’m an expert in “Common Fucking Sense” at the University of Not Being a Total Cocksucker, and I heard that bedbugs are the hideous stuff of nightmares, and they infest your clothes, get into all your furniture, and can live for months without food, heat or moisture, plus if you see one, there’s probably a thousand.  The woman who wrote this letter has likely had to burn down her house and start over in a different state by now.  Please, fellow hotel guests, tell me if the hotel has bedbugs!  I really want to know!

“Usually the bug, or bugs, are confined to a room or two. So assuming you felt the management was taking your complaint seriously, the most you could accurately have told Luggage Cart Guy was ‘Any given room in this hotel might or might not have a bedbug,’ which unfortunately is now true of any lodging anywhere.”

Again, I’m not a “bedbug expert,” but something about this math seems fishy.  It seems like a hotel that definitely has bedbugs… is statistically more likely to have bedbugs… than a hotel that may or may not have bedbugs.

“Warning your friend away, or running through the lobby telling people to flee for their lives, would merely have sown panic, hurting the hotel’s business while scattering guests to other accommodations where they’d face the same discomfiting odds.”  Or, it might “scatter guests” to “other accommodations” that don’t have bedbugs.  Then the infested hotels would go out of business, which is bad for some reason I confess I don’t fully grasp.  (I also am curious what would constitute a valid reason to panic, if not the prospect of waking up covered in bites from bloodthirsty hell-lice.)  This “don’t hurt the hotel’s business” line of thought is just Pink Slime Redux.  How can you call yourself a patriot, if you’re not willing to eat slurry and have your blood sucked by parasites to help American businesses prosper?  We don’t need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers, we need more ammonia-laced meat and stinging welts!

But playing favorites with the businesses we patronize is just the beginning of the capitalist consumer’s sins.  For Kaminer, the customer is always wrong, whether it’s in our choice of a night’s lodging, or the DNA of our future offspring.  In “Donor Agent Provocateur,” a couple had beef with a fertility consultant who wouldn’t help them find an egg donor with the same ethnic background as the Hawaiian wife.

“As a matter of professional ethics,” the consultant screwed up, but who cares.  They should focus their scrutiny on their own souls.  “For starters, if your fantasy is a child who resembles your wife, be forewarned that choosing a donor who shares your ethnicity might not get you there. Common ethnicity won’t guarantee a close genetic resemblance; given all the unseen variables, two people who have a common heritage might be further apart genetically than two people who do not….Choosing a donor of the same ethnicity wouldn’t guarantee a close physical resemblance, either. As in any other group, one ethnic Hawaiian might look like the world’s most beautiful linebacker; another might look like a homely blade of grass. “

I know it comes as a surprise to the rest of us that ethnic Hawaiians don’t all look the same.  But this ethnically Hawaiian woman was probably aware of that already?

“In any case, less than 6 percent of Hawaii’s population identifies itself as ‘ethnically Hawaiian.’”  So… there aren’t that many ethnic Hawaiians around?  That is a truly tiny minority.  I have an idea for how they can make it up to 7 percent!  (Hint… it involves Hawaiian eggs.)   I do realize that if even one more of them turns up, Glenn Beck will start demanding they go back to their country and stop stealing our jobs.  But I think we’ll survive the Polynesian Peril.

“Lots of parents hope their children will be new and improved versions of themselves, which might include looking either more or less “ethnic” than they do. Meanwhile others dream of children who bear no resemblance to them whatsoever…. Perhaps you feel that it’s better for children to grow up among their own, or that it’s kinder to children not to broadcast the complexities of their conception…. Give some thought to the assumptions that might be shaping your search and to their possible ethical implications.”  Well, jeez.  Maybe she just likes being ethnically Hawaiian, and thinks her progeny would like it, too.  If no Hawaiians wanted Hawaiian eggs, ethnic Hawaiian egg donors would all be out of luck.  White people aren’t exactly known for their freewheeling approach to their kids’ ethnicity.  “What the hell!  I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii, but popping this mystery egg in my uterus will be the next best thing!” — No white person, ever.

But this crusade against the Hawaiian eugenic master plan is not Kaminer’s only foray into hot-button racial issues.  In this column, a literature buff has a copy of Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus on their bookshelf, but is afraid it will offend black friends.  Actually, what the person wrote was “We have African-American friends, and we would not want to upset them (or anyone else, for that matter).”  Very racially sensitive.  Not only does the writer acknowledge parenthetically that people who aren’t black might be upset by racial slurs, they even express a willingness to “remove the book from the shelf.”

If I may offer my own piece of advice: Don’t remove the book.  If someone sees the complete works of Joseph Conrad on your shelf, they’ll probably be like, “huh,” and forget about it.  If they find The Nigger of the Narcissus stashed between the sofa cushions, or in a drawer next to the swizzle sticks, the result will be awkwardness of Larry David proportions.

Kaminer responds: “If you want to be utterly certain your books never offend anyone, you’ll have to remove quite a few more volumes than that. A feminist might be miffed by the notion of a “shrew” being tamed. For that matter, a Trojan could object to the ‘Iliad.’  And pious people everywhere might take offense at the Bible, with its scandalous tales of adultery and murder.”  Zing!  You really showed those Bible readers out there.  Christians, why aren’t you more offended by the existence of the founding text of your faith?  In all seriousness, I think my readers can agree that the Bible is whack, and does indeed narrate many outrageous incidents.  However, when the Bible is on a shelf, you can’t really see all the adultery and murder stuff.   It probably just says “THE BIBLE: Thou Shalt Not Steal This Book!“, or something clever like that.  (Biblical scholars, feel free to help me out).  If you’re displaying the Bible in such a way that every single page is visible, your friends are probably be more offended by the fact that you’re a serial killer.

As for the analogy with Trojans, Troy hasn’t existed as a city-state or race since the time of the Byzantine empire.  And since the Iliad portrays Trojans in a sympathetic and positive light, I can’t see why they would be offended by it, unless these hypothetical spectral Trojans are also Trojan War Revisionists, for some reason.  Now that I think of it, Taming of the Shrew isn’t a great example, either.  I can’t believe with all the offensively named books she could have mentioned –  The Rape of the Lock, The Rape of Lucrece, Christ Killers, Queer, Cunt Coloring Book, Dude You’re a Fag, Transgender Cumslut, Crackers, Chickenheads (actually a song, but still) — the best she could come up with a dusty ol’ Shakespeare play.  For shame!

Kaminer mostly agrees with me, arguing that curious guests could just ask about the hosts’ reading material, “assuming your friends aren’t familiar with the book.”  I’m not fond of this “assuming that…” gambit.  So far, Kaminer has “assumed” that a bedbug-infested hotel takes concerns about bedbugs seriously, and that someone’s black friends have never heard of Joseph Conrad.  This sort of thing is why assumptions got a bad reputation.  Next time stick to empirical observation.

But the dilemmas raised by this letter transcend storage solutions.  Don’t the moral imperatives involved in possessing a racist book have more to do with the mind that reads it than the shelf that houses it?  Don’t we have a duty to understand ideas that shock us, that we might better understand the cultures that spawned them?   After all, if we ignore the biases of the past, how can we hope to recognize the hatred and bigotry that persists in our present day?  Would we not do well to confront morally abhorrent ideas head on?  Is it not more truly admirable to grapple with the moral implications of a text like Conrad’s, rather than basking in the factitious comfort of more inoffensive fare?

Or if that’s too much work, there’s always this.

Just as the Iliad and the Bible were the founding myths of their day, the story of the Sensitive White Person Who Had Black Friends And Then Told Everyone About It is truly a tale of our time.  But not all Ethicist letters have the same universal resonance.  Some readers seem to be competing to top each other in triviality.  One letter writer wants to know whether it’s okay for his wife to tear the crossword out of a magazine at the beauty salon.  Another person checks out e-books from the library, and sometimes they stay on his device an extra day after the “due date.”  People must feel very clever for coming up with such fine-grained dilemmas; we’ll doubtless soon see Chuck Palahniuk and Michael Chabon debating whether you can re-use a stamp if the post office forgot to draw over it with that wavy line.

What if the stamp has an inspirational message?

Perhaps sensing that the format was in danger of growing stale, last month the magazine ran an Ethicist-related contest for the best moral argument in favor of eating meat.  This is not a bad idea; a large proportion of Times-reading bobos are going to eat meat whether it’s ethical or not, so asking them to justify their lifestyle is as reasonable as it is maddeningly pointless.  Ariel Kaminer introduced the results.  She says the entries were great, but some responses were super zany.  For instance, some readers complained because all five judges were white men!

“People dismissed the contest as either too elitist or too populist. And then there was the outrage over the demographics of our judges. ‘I would like to propose the next subject for debate in The Ethicist,’ one critic wrote. ‘It can be titled, ‘Defending Misogyny: Why Women Are Not Needed as Experts in the Year 2012.’ ” Yes… that person does sound pretty “outraged,” from the looks of that unintelligible, profanity-laden screed.  Jeez, lay off the caps lock, lady!  Hysterical feminists strike again.

Nevertheless, these complaints must have rankled with Kaminer.  In a later portion of the column devoted to “wacky” debate about the contest (including allegations that it was “anti-pig-ist” and “a conspiracy”), she quotes another exchange.  A group of women wrote in to say “the cycle of prejudice continues in which white male elite perspectives dominate the production of social facts.”  On the other hand, there’s this rebuttal.  “This is a panel of five, for heaven’s sake, for a meaningless contest. How diverse can it be? Why should anyone care how diverse it is? — ETHICSALARMS.COM”

“How diverse can it be”?  Well… it could have at least one person who isn’t a white male?  There are at least five races and in infinite number of genders that I am aware of, so it could be a maximum of infinity percent more diverse.  I also appreciate the “who cares, why is this important” attitude.  Facts and opinions in the form of written language are indeed “meaningless.”  That is why only 30 million people per month read the New York Times, and why Percy Shelly referred to poets as “the unacknowledged alcoholic hobo drifters of mankind.”  You are aware, EthicsAlarms.com, if that is your real name, that people actually pay money to receive this publication?

Anyway, the winner was a white male.  Congratulations!

If even New York Times readers are guilty of P.C. liberal fascism, who is innocent?  It’s not always easy to lead an ethical life, as Kaminer acknowledges in her farewell piece.  A teenager started an ethicist column in the high school paper, but people complained that she was offering advice she herself “wouldn’t be able to follow.”

Kaminer offers comfort:  “I’d be extra-suspicious of any ethicist (or baker or harpsichordist, for that matter) who offered himself up as a paragon of virtue for all others to emulate. The title indicates nothing about personal rectitude, just a willingness to think about basic issues like how we should treat one another and what is fair. Those may sound like things that everyone thinks about every day.”

Yes:  The most important thing about things we think about every day is that we don’t ever try to practice them.  It’s like, I might think all the time about working on my dissertation, or mailing in my rent check, or voting just because it’s “election day.”  But if I actually did those things, I’d be setting myself up as some paragon of virtue who actually does those things.  I’d be a hypocrite!  Don’t you see?  It’s thinking about things, in the abstract, forever, that make our intellectual life so varied and stimulating.

“I’ve probably read a hundred letters demanding that I offer less advice and more ethical theory — and an equal number that made the opposite demand.”  Someone was demanding Ariel Kaminer offer less ethical theory?  Look, I don’t know how the public schools have let students down so grievously, but you can’t have less ethical theory than zero.  Stop demanding that Ariel Kaminer do the impossible.  “Oooh, I think she should offer ethical theory in the form of the square root of a negative number!”  Not going to happen, people.

“I think ethics may be having a moment.”

You spend an entire year giving mediocre advice, and you think I’m going to be impressed just because you quote Immanuel Kant?

But if she’s right, this will be a HUGE best-seller.

The next person to step into the fray was Andrew Light, associate director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.  The letter writer’s brother is all messed up in the head after years of drugs, motorcycle accidents, and numerous jail stints.  Her aged parents want her to act as his “guardian,” but she’s a single mom and lives seven hours away.  Plus, she “[has] no relationship” with him.  Is she obligated to do it?

“Are you your brother’s keeper? Now, there’s a question that carries a storied history, and its answer has some weighty implications.”  Well, it had weighty implications in that one Bible story, because that one Bible dude had already murdered his brother.  This lady hasn’t done anything yet.

“I don’t think you have a moral obligation to become your brother’s guardian.”  Phew!  That settles that.

“…but it would be good if you could find a way to help him without putting your daughter in jeopardy.  Just about any account of obligation to others allows, and sometimes requires, partiality based on family ties, friendship and other relationships….. We might think — and more important, your question betrays that you might suspect — that you have a special obligation to help your brother because he’s your brother.”  So, she doesn’t have a “moral obligation,” but everyone “might think” that she has a “special obligation.” Very lucid.  You can’t just say no to helping helping this guy — he’s your brother!  I mean, you can.  You’re not obligated to do anything. But wouldn’t you feel terrible acting that way, little lady?

“You have special ties that bind you….Even though you’re alienated from your brother now, I hope there was something in your past that brought you together…. Now you ought to try to draw on that experience of being a sibling and do the best that you can in a difficult situation.”  That’s smart!  It’s good idea to draw on your past, and to do the best you can in the future.  Does Andrew Light go to the same Tarot reader as me?

“If… you can help him in some way without endangering your daughter, that would be the best course. “  It’s good to do good things, as long as it doesn’t cause anything bad to happen.  Right again!

“I agree with philosophers like Samuel Scheffler at New York University who argue that the people we are closest to — those with whom we have valued relationships that aren’t based only on what they can do for us — can make some special claims on us. I also think we’re all better off when we respond to them.”  Oh, God.  I always said they should hire someone who had studied philosophy, but when it finally happened, it’s like being in David Brooks hell.  Next thing he’ll be tying this whole thing in with Hamiltonianism.  Anyway, according to Samuel Scheffler, the official philosopher of Precious Moments, sometimes when people are really special to us, they make us have selfless feelings of love and devotion!  Thanks for the sound bite.  It would be weird to tell a lady she has an “obligation” to  sacrifice all her money and free time fixing a man’s mistakes.  It’s so much nicer if she just, like, wanted to, because of binds, and ties, and familial warm fuzzy feelings, and nurturing, and the Bible and stuff.  Another triumph for philosophy!

Plus, this dude has the worst silhouette ever. Get some clothes that fit correctly!

Maybe having read philosophy isn’t really that great a qualification.  But how about the next guy, Philip Levine?  He’s a poet — the poet laureate, no less!  He should have a clear, yet forgiving perspective into human frailty.

“I’m married and recently had an emotional affair. As a result of the frequent phone contact with my paramour, I went way over my minute usage allowance.  While I freely admit the emotional affair was a breach on a number of levels, am I responsible for reimbursing her? NAME WITHHELD”

Look, I’m not saying “emotional affairs” aren’t a real thing.  But I am saying that all of these people’s problems could be solved by getting an unlimited plan.   Levine, however, has other ideas.  “How long has it been since I heard the word ‘paramour’ used seriously? I’m afraid I do not welcome it back, nor can I imagine why your wife welcomed you back after your ‘emotional affair’…. You strike me as someone with a limited capacity for empathy…. I believe you are both linguistically and ethically challenged. Paying back the money… is the least you can do, but since you hesitate to do even that, I fear you are incapable of doing more….. You need much more than advice from an ethicist…. You need to see a shaman who can change who you are, and your wife needs to see a lawyer.”

Wow, that is venomous.  I suspect that Levine, who is 83, doesn’t know what an “emotional affair is.”   He perhaps thinks it’s just a regular affair, but with more emotions.  Thank God no one asked him a question involving FWB’s, flash mobs, sexting, tweeple, jeggings or the pregnant man.

A flier complains that her seatmate spread over into her space and refused to move.

“I know what my mother would have done: she would have used the only weapon she had — her voice…. She would have loudly named this man for what he is, a masher, and thereby called attention to this boorish behavior. Is that word, ‘masher,’ still in use for something other than what you crush potatoes with? If not, it should be.”  I mean, I’ve heard of it.  As a native speaker of the English language, I am also aware that it is not in common circulation.  “I think you should tell this man that you would be gay if he would give you more space.  By ‘gay,’ I mean happy and carefree.  Is that still the word’s primary meaning?  I’m not sure, because I have no access to the contemporary vernacular, except in the thirty-million-reader-a-month newspaper for which I write.”

I don’t recommend that this woman confuse and irritate her fellow fliers by shouting “He’s a masher! He’s a masher!”  Also, did Levine just make fun of that one guy for saying “paramour” (a perfectly acceptable, if uncommon, English word), but instruct another letter writer to reinstate 1920′s slang?  Jumpin’ Jehosaphat!  This guy has some moxie!

This silhouette is even uglier! Stand up straight!

Finally, we reach the present day.  (There were three other guest columnists –  Cheryl Strayed, Betsey Stevenson and Philip B. Corbett — but they never said anything especially risible.)  Last week the Times unveiled their new Ethicist: Famous rock ‘n’ roll guy Chuck Klosterman!  The bestselling author of such works as Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, he inexplicably claims to have “always wanted this job. “  Klosterman follows the lead of Kaminer et al. by saying he is qualified only because “I’m alive and I’m engaged with the world,” while Hugo Lindgren excitingly tells us that he “isn’t afraid of expressing his opinions.”  Now that Klosterman’s maiden column is out, how did he do?  I dared to dream he would be the Times‘ least objectionable Ethicist yet, and I was not disappointed.  Confronted with a question about someone who doesn’t like his half-sister, he steers clear of Andrew Light “why don’t you loooove them” guilt trips.  He doesn’t use any jazz-age slang or imply that black people don’t know who Joseph Conrad is.  Are the days of mocking the Ethicist over?

Maybe.  But then, there’s this.  Some people’s cat had a tumor, and the vet said it was too frail to survive surgery.  Their neighbor kidnapped the cat and had it operated on anyway.  Was their action justified?

“Let’s imagine this 12-year-old cat is actually a 12-year-old boy and that you’re committed to a religion that does not permit medical procedures involving surgery.”

I don’t think that’s how thought experiments are supposed to work.  How about this:  Maybe the neighbor is dying of cancer… and instead of a cat, it’s a 12-year-old motorcycle that the letter-writer won’t ride for environmental reasons…the neighbor has 12 days to live, and he wants to borrow it for one last ride?  No wait wait, I’ve got a better one.  Let’s imagine the cat is a 12-pound wheel of Gouda, and the owners are lactose-intolerant vegans who received it as a housewarming gift, and the neighbor needs the Gouda for the big fondue contest that’s coming up tomorrow… and if they win the fondue contest, they get a million dollars and use the money to found an organization that helps elderly cats?  No, that’s stupid.  Okay, check this out.  It’s not a neighbor, it’s her half-brother!  This guy has a collection of 12 offensive books on his  shelf, including Hitler!,  Lolita, The Jew of Malta, The Merchant of Venice, the Bible, the Iliad and the Kama Sutra.  He refuses to take them down, even though his boss is coming over tomorrow, and she’s a half-Jewish, half-Trojan celibate feminist, and he’s in line for a big promotion.   If he gets the promotion, he’ll give his sister the money to buy 12 human eggs of her choice and clear up a bedbug infestation in the hotel she operates.  Then is it okay to steal the cheese/motorcycle/books?  I have no idea.

Postscript:  Props to Tumblr blog A Better Ethicist from providing philosophically credible commentary!  Ethics fans, please check it out!

Today, we examine “Once Staid, Nail Polish Becomes Fashion Accessory,” by Style section colossus Ruth La Ferla.  Nail polish has become a fashion accessory, as opposed to what it was before (a life-saving antiseptic, wound sealant and emetic in survival situations).  La Ferla opens with an anecdote about Elizabeth Jagger, the daughter of Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger.  “When she was no more than 10 or 12, Lizzie Jagger liked to paint English landscapes on a set of fake nails that she toted with her everywhere.”  That’s adorable, but it happened over ten years ago — what is Liz Jagger doing in this article?  Did La Ferla get her digits from Trudie Styler or Marianne Faithfull, and now she just wants to let us know what BFF’s they are?

In any case, Jagger’s “brush” (!) with nail greatness has ended.  “Eventually she abandoned her hobby, partly, she joked, ‘because I couldn’t see a future in it.’  Oooh, Lizzie, if only you’d had a crystal ball. These days you might find yourself besieged by a veritable army of product developers, all eager to pick your brain.”  You’re giving career advice to someone who made over $100,000 posing for Playboy?  I would imagine model/actress Liz Jagger, face of Lancôme cosmetics, is at peace with her humble lot in life.

Anyway, these hypothetical product developers are besieging the hypothetical Jagger in search of “ways to turn nail polish… into a must-have capable of transforming nails into miniaturized canvasses for some of the nerviest experiments that fashion permit.”  More nervy than that guy who dressed men up in pastel pencil skirts, padded Frankenstein sweaters, cropped dog-print vests and spiked rugby helmets?  Fashion used to be nothing but outrageous experiments.  I can’t believe they’re falling behind like this.

Indeed, “In recent months, cosmetics makers have invested in lacquers a kind of daring all but unheard of a decade ago, introducing innovations from glitter and crackled surface treatments to stick-on nail art and even scents, and imbuing their products with every color known to nature.”  So while clothing designers were giving us homeless chic, lobster-claw shoes and high-waisted Bart Simpson underpants, cosmetic makers have been working on… glitter nail polish and stickers?  Thanks for reinventing the wheel, guys.  It’s nice to know that if all human culture is destroyed in a world war, the surviving remnants of our race will be able to reconstruct the works of Lisa Frank.

Not impressed. Needs more glitter.

Innovations include such hues as “muddied orange, toxic green and shrieking mauve.”  These colors do indeed sound radical, and if they don’t work out as nail polish, I suggest their makers go into the extreme sports drink biz.  Such products are “snapped up by consumers intent on releasing their inner Nicki Minaj”; buyers are also lusting for “three-dimensional effects” (magic eye pictures, I can only assume) and “quirky patterns.”

“’Nails come in any way, shape or form,’ said Karen Grant, a senior analyst with the NPD Group, which tracks cosmetics trends.’”

This reminds one of nothing so much as the short story “If the Post-Impressionists Were Dentists,” in which one artiste insists a patient’s “bridge should be enormous and billowing and wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire!”  I would love to know how this “anything goes” approach translates to manicures.  Nails in the shape of a Möbius strip? A Mandelbrot set? A geodesic dome?  A baobab tree?  The Gömböc, a homogeneous self-righting object?  Nicki Minaj wannabe walks into a nail salon, says “I want each nail in the shape of sphere eversion.”  CHAOS ENSUES.  The top geometry experts of the day, working around the clock to appease the fashionable masses.  A veritable army of product developers would be knocking down the doors of algebraic topologists, demanding they invent novel forms.  This is a great time to be a shape inventor!  (Posing for Playboy still pays better, though.)

“[There was] a 67 percent increase in the sales of department store brands in 2011 over the previous year, and a jump of 29 percent for their mass-market counterparts, according to NPD, which tallied the combined sales at $710 million. The advent of brashly adventurous, and sometimes garish, colors and designs coincided roughly with the collapse of the Dow.”  If La Ferla is referring to the 2008 collapse, other noteworthy occurrences in that year include the attempted assassination of Maldivian president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Michael Phelps’ eight-time Olympic gold medal win, a total eclipse of the sun in Canada, Bill Gates’ retirement, and the My Bloody Valentine reunion tour.  We shouldn’t just, like, assume everything is about the stock market.  Any of these other events could have caused, or been caused by, the nail polish boom.  For instance, were any of these nail product developers superstitious Canadians, or hardcore MBV fans?  Did nail artisans’ devotion to their craft inspire Michael Phelps to strive for victory?  Was Bill Gates waiting to retire until he could be sure sales of department store nail products would remain robust?  It may take historians decades to untangle all these threads. (Further complicating matters, there was a different market crash in 2011, also known as the year Estonia adopted the Euro.  Can we get Paul Krugman on this case?)

“The eye adjusts, and today the acid tints and swirling patterns that five years ago were outré have entered the mainstream.”

Thanks to the eye’s 540 million years of evolution, I can see in the dark, like, one second after switching off a lamp. How fucking long do you think it takes to adjust to a “swirling pattern”?  In any case, the human retina can indeed process incoming visual imagery, and as a result there are a lot of products to choose from.  “Indeed, there are more colors than in a pack of Skittles.” If my math is correct, that’s… more than five.  This is even less impressive than the swirling patterns.  I think La Ferla should have written, “There are more colors than there are Skittles at the Skittles factory, and some of the colors of the nail polishes are the same colors as Skittles, although thousands of them are not, due to fluctuations of the Dow.”

“…many of which can be applied in one’s bathroom.”  Where does La Ferla suppose I applied nail polish before, on the deck of my yacht?  “There’s a hot new breed of foods available at the grocery store, many of which can be eaten in one’s kitchen!”

After all this science and political economy, La Ferla gets down to nitty gritty, telling us about polish shades inspired by crazy stuff like menstrual blood and dirty laundry.  “Elsewhere novelty seekers can choose brands like Layla, which offers holographic images, and Deborah Lippmann, which sells polishes embedded with iron particles. Hold a magnet over these, Ms. Lippmann, the company founder, explained, and its shape will appear, as if by magic, on the nail’s surface.”

“As if by magic“?  I assume that’s a rough paraphrase, and that Deborah Lippmann’s actual explanation was a bit more lucid.  At the risk of making a dated Insane Clown Posse reference, or being burned at the stake as a sorceress, the science behind magnets has been well understood for quite some time now.  Anyway, there it is: an image of stripes, as if by magic.  Readers who assumed they’d get a magical full-color reproduction of whatever was on their favorite magnet — cat photo, phone number for pizza delivery, a guy saying “College: The Best Seven Years of My Life!” — will be sadly disappointed.  Also, the “holographic effect” referred to here, while undeniably cool, is nothing more nor less than an iridescent line.

Again, if any trend-chasers were expecting a polish that makes a cool picture, like the hologram unicorns that captivated us so in our youth, they are bound to feel chagrined.  La Ferla should never become an art critic.  Portraits in which the eyes “follow you around the room” must really blow her mind, and she’d probably end up getting confused and telling people Michaelangelo’s David is five-dimensional and will literally make love to you on the floor of the Uffizi Gallery.

Fuck yeah! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!

“Even the most circumspect women are gravitating to nail salons to request piercings or 3-D effects.”  The most circumspect?  Like, the uptight mom in an 80′s sex farce, or the prissy fiancée in a rom-com about a guy who realizes he’s in love with the free-spirited florist he met two weeks before the wedding?  This person is going into a beauty salon and asking for Hologram Tupac and safety pin piercings on her nails?  The audience for the next Austen or Brontë adaptation is going to be so confused.

A spokeswoman for some salon “recalled that one customer arrived with a photograph of her boyfriend, asking to have his image replicated on her thumb.”  I think this woman might actually be one of the least circumspect.  I once saw a truck at the car wash that had been airbrushed with images of other trucks, but I didn’t go around telling everyone that “even the most circumspect motorists were now embracing the exuberant self-referential truck art trend” or whatever.

“Until about a month ago, Julie Solomon, a client at TenOverten in TriBeCa, favored translucent pink nails  that discreetly complemented her black-on-black wardrobe [N.B. I think she is referring to translucent polish; you can't make your body's organic tissues turn see-through, no matter what color scheme you are trying to match].  Reluctant to try something new, she finally succumbed, and last week had her nails glitter-coated.”  Glitter again!  “‘I was taking a chance,’ said Ms. Solomon, 44. ‘But I got so many compliments, especially from women asking where they could have the same thing done.’”  Have you guys noticed that the women interviewed in the Style section will go to a salon for literally any fucking thing?  They can’t blow-dry their own hair or tweeze their own eyebrows.  If somebody manages to turn putting on chapstick into a demi-permanent aromatherapeutic salon treatment, bitches will be signing up for waiting lists.

Overview

Likelihood that trend exists: 9/10

Importance of trend in grand scheme of things: 1/10

Adherence to trend piece formula: 10/10 (check out flawless Paragraph of Statistics and ITCET!)

Best aspect of author’s writing style: Is friends with Elizabeth Jagger

Suggestion for improving author’s writing style: High-school science refresher course

Does this sound familiar?  Yes, New York Times reader, it’s a description of you!  Or so the typical New York Times culture writer appears to believe.  Maybe it isn’t.  But it’s definitely a description of the typical New York Times culture writer.    And these authors’ thoughts on the issues of relevance, timeliness and hipness are instructive.  Because they are offered up to the gaze of millions of readers, their struggles for cool are those of the average social media user, writ large.  In the case of these beleaguered scribes (though hopefully not the rest of us), the result is a hideous vicious cycle of self-conscious navel-gazing, ironic quipping, defensive posturing, and counterintuitive trend-prognisticating designed to make the writer feel ahead of the curve.

Hence all the articles about “New Speakeasy in Bushwick” and “Meditation is the New Botox” and whatnot.  This discourse’s ostensible purpose is to help us understand the trending topics of today, so we can feel like the stylish young things we once were.  But cultural phenomena are ephemeral, appearing and disappearing like the wind.  And no one really cares about a new line of cruelty-free fountain pen ink or artisanal baking soda, anyway.  Paying attention to the pieces’ actual subject matter does us no good.   If we wish to grasp the essence of New York Timesian cool, we must get beyond the minutia to the “deep structure” that underlies it.

To that end, let’s glance at a work that presents the plight of the aging trend-chaser in particularly stark terms: Wm. Ferguson’s “I like the New Coldplay. Sue Me.”  Ferguson is a columnist for The 6th Floor Blog, which mysteriously describes itself as “eavesdropping on the Times Magazine.”  In this post, he lets us know that he likes the new Coldplay.   How does one come to find this out?  It’s hard to imagine.  Maybe he was in some business that played the whole album over the speakers, like… a rollerblade shop?  Some sort of indoor ziplining establishment?   Does Dave & Buster’s have a dance floor?  It’s baffling.  But however the obsession began, it is now in full bloom and Ferguson can’t be silent.  He wants to unburden himself, perhaps even recruit others to his cause.  So, like a man who finally tried Chipotle and is now desperate to warn the world that the “mild” salsa isn’t actually mild, he begins his quest for lifestyle acceptance.

“I mentioned to the magazine’s editor that the new Coldplay record was pretty good. He told me to leave his office. Actually, first he said, ‘Oh, I’m gonna tweet this.’ Then he kicked me out.”  Sick burn!  Ferguson concludes that “Coldplay has assumed the mantle (passed down from Hootie and the Blowfish, Dave Matthews Band, and guys like that) of Relatively Pleasant Pop Band That Inspires Reactionary Hatred. Sixteen million people bought that Hootie record, and I never met a single person who admitted to owning it.”  Are you sure those sixteen million people are the same sixteen million you meet in your life as a music and arts blogger living in Manhattan?  Wait until Ferguson sees the numbers on snuff-chewing and NASCAR.  He’s going to think everyone in Park Slope is living a double life.

Statistics aside, Ferguson remains committed to his reverse-Emperor’s-New-Clothes scenario.  “I don’t know how Coldplay earned the enmity of the cool people.”  Well fuck, it’s probably because no one told them Coldplay is “relatively pleasant”!   If the world’s avant-garde cultural elites have one thing in common, it’s their fondness for inoffensively mild, interchangeable cultural products.   Also, maybe the cool people didn’t hear that they won a Grammy.  As a result of their scorn, this multimillion-selling act is cruelly underrated.  W-Ferg may not grok the hate, “But I know it’s real.”  Hell yeah, it’s real!  That one guy was enmitous enough to write a tweet about it!  That’s 140 sarcastic characters’ worth of real, authentic Coldplay revulsion.  Shit just got real!  And Ferguson is about to show you that he can be real, too.

“Coldplay — worse than cold weather? Worse, even, than cold sores?  I say no. Coldplay is not worse than cold sores.”   I… hmm. I feel like this can’t be how this joke was supposed to turn out.  The fact that he can only think of two bad things with “cold” in the name is just one of its many structural defects.  I would have been like “Coldplay — worse than the Cold War?  No, because a Coldplay album only feels like it lasts 46 years!  Worse than cold fusion?  No, because there is no scientifically accepted theoretical model for the occurrence of a nuclear reaction inside a chemically bound crystal structure, while people just wish Coldplay was a scientific impossibility!  Worse than quitting heroin cold turkey?  No, because symptoms of opioid dependence include tremors, sweating, tachycardia, vomiting, diarhhea, malaise, anxiety, panic attacks, depression and priapism, while Coldplay’s music has never been known to cause priapism!  Worse than Vanilla Ice, whose name also invokes the idea of coldness?  No, because Vanilla Ice’s flamboyant persona transgressed middle-class standards of aesthetic decorum in ways that made him unacceptable to the era’s cultural gatekeepers, and in rap slang, “bad” means good!

All right, now Ferguson is going to get real.  “Before you dismiss me as just another middle-aged, upper-middle-class tool who wears $125 jeans with a blazer, let me present my credentials.   I saw the Clash on the ‘Combat Rock’ tour in a college gymnasium… own original pressings of ‘This Charming Man,’ ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart,’the Hib-Tone ‘Radio Free Europe’; I have the vinyl of every Niagara record on German import. I was cool. You must believe me.”  No, no, I musn’t!  That’s not how it works!  If you love your coolness, you have to set it free, and if it returns, it is yours, but if it doesn’t, it never was!  Let it go!

But he’d rather cling.  In this paragraph, Ferguson links to an article mocking dad-rock, as well as to the song “Losing My Edge,” which pokes fun at people who fear losing their edge.  This suggests something disturbing:  Ferguson is dimly conscious of the futility of what he is doing — trying to prove he’s still cool — but the awareness hasn’t sunk in.  Ferguson thinks that if he makes a convincing enough case, he can overcome the uncoolness of liking Coldplay, as well as the even more irredeemable uncoolness of trying to prove he is cool.  He has generated enough partial self-awareness to screen his vulnerable psyche from the consequences of full self-awareness, a psychological defense mechanism known as I Love Sarvis Syndrome.

“But I think the end of the Coldplay hatred might be in sight.”  Because of Madonna… somehow.  “Maybe you remember a time when Madonna was the scourge of the culture…. It was only through some weird confluence of Sonic Youth patronage and postfeminist studies that Madonna could be appreciated ironically. We were ‘dancing’ to ‘Madonna’ at a ‘club’ — get it?”  Your 80′s friends sound great. I wonder how they turned out later.   “Check this out, I’m ‘having sex’ after going on a ‘hot date’ with someone I ‘truly care about’!  Now I’m having an ‘orgasm’ — get it?”  Five years later… “Oh my God you guys, I’m ‘pregnant’!  I feel really ‘joyful’ about starting a ‘family’!  Now I’m ‘giving birth’ at a ‘hospital’!  Isn’t this hilarious?”

Sadly for Ferguson’s friends and others like them, “there is no ironic way into this band.”  But he can suggest another attitude you might adopt toward Coldplay.  “It hit me while listening to ‘Mylo Xyloto’…it’s just pop!”  Well, that settles it.  Only the greatest recording artists of a generation are honored by music bloggers with a genre descriptor.  If Ferguson has found a category into which this band’s music falls, they must be good.

Anyway, now that we’ve seen an overview of the hipness arbitration process, let’s look at each of the steps in detail.

1. Be Objective (“X Quality is Cool, Coldplay Is X, so Coldplay is Cool”)

Coolness is the most evanescent of abstract qualities.  It might slip from your grasp one day, and you wouldn’t even know it.  The only way to be certain your awesomness will last is to back it up with 100 percent objective reasons.  Ferguson’s flashing of coolness credentials is emblematic of this tactic; he goes on to note that “If you’re looking for permission to like Coldplay, go ahead. Brian Eno produced it, you know.”  Well, Coldplay probably paid Brian Eno to do that — but he drank his own urine for free.  Think about that, Coldplay fans.

But you don’t have to be a connoisseur of glam rock and urophagia to have objective reasons for liking something.  The “great musicianship” argument is one of the most frequently deployed.  In “A Band Tradition, Both Carried On and Changed, ” Jon Pareles laments the public’s lack of appreciation for Phish:  The band is “so light-fingered that its remarkable musicianship is often taken for granted.”  Stupid music fans, taking it for granted that professional musicians can play their instruments well just because 99 percent of professional musicians can play their instruments well!  Why can’t people be more like they were in the middle ages, when if a wandering minstrel showed up who could play the hurdy-gurdy really fast, you’d follow him around all day?  The scene is going to hell!   Maybe if more talented young people would aspire to “make it” in the music biz, the industry would be a little competitive, and we would have some performers around with the technical capacity to play their own songs on instruments of their choice.

At this concert, Phish’s overall demeanor was “Uptempo, playing familiar songs and ready to keep fans dancing — never getting too abstract or experimental.” Right away, this tells me everything I need to know about Phish:  Their music has a somewhat rapid pace, can be danced to, and is not abstract experimental noise.  Maybe I underestimated them!  This really sets them apart from both Einstürzende Neubauten, and that other industrial noise band I listened to one time that sounds like Einstürzende Neubauten.

“The musicians’ fingers flew; lights splayed above the stage; glowsticks were tossed, in mass bursts, at big transitions; balloons bounced around.”  Mistakes were made; colorless green ideas slept furiously; the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.  Wait a minute, there were balloons…BOUNCING AROUND?  FUCK!!! How did I miss that concert??

Some of these coolness criteria derive from an identifiable thought process, but at other times, writers produce reasons that are purely fanciful.  In “Time Out to Enjoy All Things Phish,” Seth Schiesel writes “When your friend volunteers to work at a music festival in exchange for a ticket and ends up with the title of ‘Good Vibe Regulator’ at a custom-built all-night disco bar modeled after a giant pinball machine, you know you’ve ended up someplace pretty cool.”  I dunno, man.  I used to think that way.  When I was young and naive, I thought once I finally got the chance to drop acid inside a giant pinball machine and hang out with the Good Vibes Coordinator, I’d know I had made it.  The restless searching in my soul would be quenched.  But when it actually happened, all I felt was doubt:  Am I really having a cool experience?  This jam band festival should be special, but it feels like all the others.  I’ve achieved everything I ever dreamed of, so why does it seem so…hollow?   Have I lost the ability to feel? 

So, thanks for giving the youth generation a Phish-related existential crisis, you dick.

2.  Be Counterintuitive (“Coldplay Is Cool”)

The archives of the Times are rife with strained and contrarian attempts to claim the mantle of cool for entities that once lacked it — like “ironic” short-sleeved shirts, Oktoberfest celebrations in “hipster beer gardens,”  “‘status symbol’ bicycle helmets” or “conceptual take[s] on white-trash barbecue.”  Even wheeled trolleys for transporting groceries are not beneath notice; one writer indulges in feverish imaginings about a world where “granny carts were becoming a hip urban accessory and I was on the cusp of a trend.”

As a result of all this upward mobility, what was once universally accepted as cool is constantly on the verge of being eclipsed.  At a foodie music festival, a chef who wowed the crowd with foie gras doughnuts observed that “food is the new rock ’n’ roll,” and that “right now people collect tastes like they’re records.”  Conversely, people buy records like they’re gluten-free chimichangas: from a truck.  Up is down!  Black is white!  The zeitgeist is in chaos!

One contender for a hipster Renaissance is the so-called “Coldplay of foods”:  pink slime.  An anonymous editorialist brings it upon himself to defend the substance, on the grounds that if it weren’t called pink slime people would like it, despite its notable qualities of being pink and slimelike.  The writer refers to it by its rap name, L.F.T.B. (Lil’ Fresh Teenage Booty, a.k.a. Lean Finely Textured Beef), and attempts an image overhaul:  While L.F.T.B. is “admittedly not all that appetizing,” its mere existence is a labor of love by Beef Products Inc., who “struggled to find the right amount of ammonia — enough to kill pathogens without leaving a strong odor.”  Not only are its odors weak, but it’s low-fat, and “does not differ greatly from the rest of ground beef, which is also mostly scraps and remnants.” OH, NO YOU DIDN’T!  Don’t you dare come after my scraps and remnants!  This is  like telling Americans that Harley-Davidsons  are made from old pieces of metal no one else wanted.  If the liberals have their way, our children won’t be taught the difference between wholesome scraps of beef and Godless, unnatural slime.  Moral relativism is dragging us down a slippery slope of chaos and insanity.  First they came for our guns, then they came for our scraps, then they came for us!  DON’T TREAD ON ME!

In any case, L.F.T.B. is unpopular.  “The first casualties of… ‘pink slime’ will likely not be anyone who eats it but rather the workers who make it.”  Beef Products Inc. is in trouble because Americans stopped buying their products.  The author condemns this act of Romneyesque creative destruction as “unfair.”  Consumers are persecuting a hardworking small extremely large business simply for selling them a food product that they don’t want to buy, because it’s so revolting.  And we’re all part of the problem!  All my life I’ve been ingesting substances I consider appetizing, not even realizing that I was contributing to a human rights tragedy.  Save Beef Products Inc., boycott not eating pink slime!

This encomium of slime is on the editorial page, but it would be interesting to see if it sparks a new trend for ironic L.F.T.B. appreciation. Hipsters will be using it in artisanal cocktails and centrifuging up their own micro-batches at home next to the lingonberry preserves.  Brooklynites will seek out indie slime makers and compare notes on which brands are the most finely textured and have just the right tang of ammonia.  Can Fuckyeahpinkslime.tumblr.com be far behind?

My illustrator was unavailable, so I made this piece of scathing social commentary myself.

3. Be Defensive (“Coldplay Haters Think They Are Cool”)

The obvious corollary to raising up the previously maligned is to tear down the arrogant: anyone who thinks they’re cooler than you.

In “Economic Theory Plots a Course for Good Food,” Damon Darlin interviews conservative economist Tyler Cowen on how to dine at restaurants.  Cowen’s advice: “If something on the menu sounds bad, it might well be especially good.  Order the ugly and the unknown….Avoid restaurants with beautiful women, hipsters and smiling and laughing people.”  Unfortunately, a borscht belt comedian failed to wander past the interview and make some remark about “stay away from recognizable food and happy, attractive people?  Something something something my mother-in-law!“  Instead, the author takes all this seriously, letting us know that we should listen to Cowen because he is “an expert on the economics of culture and the arts.”  (We are also told that he “lives in Northern Virginia.”)  I haven’t tried out his advice, because I was following a useful maxim of my own: Never trust a “culture expert” who lives in Northern Virginia.

Just as people seek out fun restaurants with good-sounding food, they also try to make their house look cool by decorating it with the latest cool stuff, but this isn’t cool to do.  In “How to Tell When You’re Over-Propped,” Steven Kurutz tells about the new trend of home-decor experts rejecting the trend of furnishing your apartment with trendy items.  “The self-consciously styled home has become almost commonplace.”  In the words of one decorator, “It’s not just rich people now…It’s all of us.”  I knew all those unemployed people were up to something, with their so-called “food stamps” and “welfare.”  They’re spending it all on neon pink ceramic antlers and repurposed colonial spittons!  DAMN YOU, OBAMA!

One design expert argues that over-styling has gotten worse: “Even my grandparents went out and bought the same lamps as their neighbors….The difference was, they weren’t trying to be awesome. They were just trying to get lights in their house…. Can everyone stop trying to be so awesome? Can we just chill out?’”  Maybe?  I’ve been amassing creative props for so long, I’m not sure I know how to stop being awesome.  But I guess I can try to be more lame.  I can learn how to do that on your design blog, right?

Indeed, today’s coolness is not truly cool, because it is different from that of our grandparents.  In “Generation Sell,” William Deresiewicz, the author of an inane memoir about “How Six Jane Austen Novels Taught Me About Life, Love, and Taking the Scenic Route,” or something, writes an ambivalent paean to contemporary youth’s entrepreneurial spirit.  “Ever since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture.”  Well, you better hurry!  I’m giving you another three years, and if you don’t have a handle on today’s youth culture by then, I’ll find a different theorist to analyze culture for me!

He explains that today’s young people have a different attitude from those of past decades.  For instance “the punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. ‘Get pissed,’ Johnny Rotten sang. ‘Destroy.’”  He also quotes “All You Need Is  Love,” but inexplicably fails to mention “Rock Around the Clock” and “Frankie Says Relax.” Nevertheless, I’m awed by the depth of his erudition.  Wm. Ferguson must have helped with research.

Today’s hipsters are different from Johnny Rotten:  They are all starting businesses selling “wallets made from recycled plastic bags,” as well as “boutique pickle companies.”  Zing!  Good one.   The reason for all this activity is that they no longer worry about “selling out.”  They are “bland” and don’t are about “rebellion [or] dissent.”  As a result, “The small business is the idealized social form of our time.”  Starting your own business has certainly never been idealized in America before. Good ol’ America, where everyone dreams of a life of mutual obligation to a feudal overlord.  “Take this job and give it to me,” that’s our motto.

“Call it Generation Sell.”  I would only call it that if I were creating a pithy slogan to market my latest nonfiction book… hey, wait a minute!  You’re pretty entrepreneurial yourself, William Deresiewicz!

“Try to picture Allen Ginsberg having a chat with Don Draper, across the counter at the local coffeehouse, about the latest Lady Gaga video.”  Deresiewicz will probably get another book deal.  But his fan fiction is terrible.

4. Be Epigrammatic (“Liking Coldplay Is the New Not Liking Coldplay”)

This category is simple: it combines Frank Bruni-esque koans with welll-known cliches to produce a confusing piece of unconventional wisdom.

“Soho is dead.  Long live Soho,” proclaims an article that tells how SoHo used to not be cool, then it was, then it wasn’t, but now it is again.

“To be cool is to be invisible,” a boutique review informs us.

“The only people who truly appreciate the fine-tuning it takes to get nerd style right are the fervently hip” is the message of “Glasses Make the Nerd.”

“Why the Old-School Music Snob is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter” suggests that “Elitists… are the new squares.”

And the inventors of the shaved-head trend “acted so bravely to make an odd look so mysteriously hip” (“Making the Most of Nothing“).

The writers seem inordinately pleased with these formulations.  But I think anyone could make their own.  Here, try it:

In the land of the ___________, the _________ ___________ is king.

.                                 (Apple product)    (undesirable trait) (indie comedian)

__________ _________ly, and __________ a big __________

(type of exercise) (adverb)                (verb)                (exotic food item)

All the _______’s a ________, and the __________ and __________ merely __________.

(social media site) (Neighborhood in NY) (cultural subgroup) (type of artisan)      (noun)

A __________, a __________, a __________: __________!

(designer label)      (celebrity)      (retro cocktail)   (band name)

Finally, if all else fails…

5. Be Rich and Famous (“No One Cares if a Famous Person Likes Coldplay!”)

It’s cool if a wealthy celebrity has obscure quirks.  On the other hand, it’s mind-blowingly hip for them to be ordinary.  If a celebrity is regular and normal in some ways, but odd in others, that shows the depth of their personality.  These people are just fascinating!

For instance, Jason Lee “listens to jazz (on vinyl), takes photographs with film, prefers to play old guitars and writes on a Smith Corona typewriter.”   Jessica Chastain owns “three custom-made hats from a Parisian atelier” and professes to “like a quirky, old-fashioned look.”  Priscilla Chan‘s Facebook “’interests’ include ‘No on Prop 8′ and Fage yogurt.”  Tori Burch‘s “teeth [are] white and even,” yet surprisingly, “the wood floor of the kitchen at her enormous (9,000 square feet) yet inviting apartment at the Pierre is painted an unexpected Tiffany blue.”

The founders of Fat Radish have set New York’s exclusive social circles ablaze with their combination of acting like rich people and having individual personality traits. “Without really trying, they have become representatives for a manly breed of stylish locavores…who wear designer jeans, spend weekends with organic farmers and hop between art fairs and fashion weeks.”  “Their vibe is a bit posh but also Eton boys gone rogue,” and one of them even “resembles an aristocratic polo player slumming in bluejeans.”

Maybe for now.  But when you reach the top of your profession, you don’t need to bother with blue jeans and all that normal-person crap.  Just look at Jack White, “the coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time.”  White “boasts a studio with secret passageways, trompe l’oeil floors, the mounted heads of various exotic ungulates…. African masks and shrunken heads from New Guinea; antique phone booths and vintage Victrolas…a cream-colored 1960 Ford Thunderbird,” and “his head carpenter, a Texan named Cowboy.”

You might argue that he isn’t that special:  Anyone could buy lots of weird stuff if they had as much money as Jack White.  True.  But at least he’s better than Coldplay.

For fashionable gals on the go: Special-event beauty service.

Why: It isn’t always easy being a fashionable gal on the go.  Sarah Remington Platt appears enviable — she boasts “a swirl of honey-blond hair, feline green eyes and a blue bloodline (her great-grandfather was Marcellus Hartley, the 19th-century philanthropist, whose funeral in 1902 drew Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpont Morgan).”  And she is enviable — especially the part about being related to Marcellus Hartley!  HOTTIE ALERT!!

Cornelius Vanderbilt was robbed!

But life had its snags for the blueblood.  She once had to do her own makeup for a Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute gala.  “‘You’re on the red carpet next to Gisele Bündchen, who had a hair and makeup team and six hours to get ready…. So stressful.’”  Thus was born the idea for Vensette.com, which lets you choose from a menu of “looks” that stylists re-create on your special day.  Examples of Vensette-worthy occasions mentioned in the article include ringing the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange and… you’re going to get it for your daughter’s prom, aren’t you?  I knew it!  Next year we’re going to be reading a trend piece on the epidemic of stylist use for bat mitzvahs and junior high graduations.  “For Some, Quinceañera Style Is a Click Away.”  Sigh.

Cost: $250 to $325 per event.

For fashionable guys on the go: A town coat.

Why:  It’s hard to predict the weather.  Sometimes it can be cold, other times it’s more warm.  “Have no fear. Fashion designers are here.”  They have astonished and delighted the general public with the town coat, a garment “designed with modern man in mind — he of the gym membership.”  It is basically a “hybridizing of the two coats, sport and over.”  “It can look quite rock ’n’ roll if you wear it with just a T-shirt and jeans.’”  To be quite honest I usually go to the Wall Street Journal with my queries on how to look “rock ‘n’ roll,” but modern guys will appreciate the convenience of not having to bring two coats to the gym.

Cost: $180 to $2,990 (see attached slide show)

For fashionable, sexually confused guys on the go: Windsor Custom Shirts.

Why: Windsor Custom is an offshoot of the Ainsworth,  a bar “that typically draws a hedge-fund crowd, where the prime tables during big games command a $1,000 minimum.”  It’s “the kind of place designed for men who pay attention to the kind of details other men will notice, preferably with envy”: penises shirts.  The founder “envisioned it much like a nightclub with bottle service, but the minimum order at his parties is not measured in vodka but in shirts, which cost $120 to $400. Suits start at $750. (A recent party had a two-shirt minimum per guest, but it was open bar.)”

You’re probably asking yourself “how did I miss out on this amazing party?”, but the man-talk that goes on in the shirt-cave is even more special.  A snippet:

”What gym do you work out at?’ Mr. Mazza asked, as he nudged Mr. Anderson away from a shade of brown that he described as ‘very dominant.’  ‘At the risk of sounding like a freak, I go to two boxing gyms, and I have memberships at Equinox, New York Sports Club and Crunch,’ said Mr. Anderson, who acknowledged he may have an exercise addiction. Since adopting a diet known as the Paleo eating philosophy, he has dropped six inches from his waist, he said. As a result, he has been buying all new clothes.  ‘What is your body fat right now?’ Mr. Mazza asked.  ‘I’d say it’s 7 or 7 1/2 percent,’ Mr. Anderson said.  ‘You know what I want to show you,” Mr. Mazza said.’”  Indeed.  I will tactfully withdraw.  It’s like if The Picture of Dorian Gray was written by Ed Hardy, then turned into a shirt — then given by you as the perfect Christmas gift!

Cost: $120 to $750

For guys (all of them):  High-end skincare products.

Why:  Guys need face cream.  Just take it from a typical man: Tom Sullivan, an entrepreneur/actor/producer/restauranteur. He “can rattle off a half-dozen creams that make up his daily routine,” which costs him about $600 a year.  While some metrosexuals in the 90s “tried” to use face products, “the fad quickly died out.”  Now, the fad is back, and it’s no longer just a fad(?).  “There is once again a demand among men for high-end skin-care products, in spite of a morbid economy and high unemployment. Or maybe because of it.”

Under the pressure of Today’s Challenging Economy, human nature has changed rapidly.  “The man today purchasing these products is so different than eight years ago… now think it’s almost a badge they wear to say, ‘I’m a modern guy because I care about my skin.’ ” Wasn’t there an Iggy Pop song about that?

Cost: $50 for Kiehl’s Ultimate Man Collection; $600/year for the full-on Tom Sullivan pampering experience.

For nostalgia buffs: Art deco bling.

“You could be forgiven for thinking that the spring 2012 fashion collections were an open call for costumes for the Baz Luhrmann remake of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ in theaters late next year.”  Not only do I not need to be forgiven for thinking that, I don’t even know what it means.  Wait, why is this a must-have gift again?

Okay, here we go.  “No need to wait until Gucci, et al., reach the stores early next year when you can brave the holiday party circuit with a Ralph Lauren suede clutch with a Deco clasp, a large Lanvin faceted crystal pendant or a pair of Dannijo silver tube earrings so aerodynamically streamlined they might have been inspired by the Burlington Zephyr.” Finally!  I was totally going to wait for Gucci et al. to reach the stores next year before braving the holiday parties, even though doing so would destroy the fabric of the space-time continuum.  Now that I know where to get accessories that look like the Burlington Zephyr, that takes care of everyone on my Christmas list.  Enjoy the shagreen and pen shell minaudière, bitches!

Cost: $220 to $1,789

For foodies: Macaron pillboxes.

Why: They mimic “those delectable pastel macarons from Ladurée, the French patisserie,” except they’re boxes with crystals all over them.  “The inspired idea came about after Jana Matheson, the creative director of Judith Leiber, returned from a trip to Paris with macarons for her office.”  They had a tea and macaron meeting, and the rest was history.  These have all the charm of a plate of macarons, with none of the calories, and at 100 times the price, plus you can put pills in them for some reason.  (Now that I think of it, this is probably more of a gift for cocaine users.)

Cost: $495

I didn’t think these were pretty enough, so I added some sparkles.

For humanitarians: AK-47 jewelry

Why:  In war-torn Africa, AK-47s are an all too common sight.  In recession-plagued America, humdrum jewelry is practically ubiquitous.  Eureka!  Fonderie 47 founder Peter Thum has the solution: His organization procures AK-47s from African warlords (kinda unclear how; don’t they have the Second Amendment in Africa? maybe he pries them from people’s cold, dead hands), melts them down, and turns them into designer jewelry .  It prevents gun violence while also being “wearable art.”  For instance, “A pair of $35,000 men’s oversize cuff links, when coupled together, becomes a bracelet.”  It’s not shaped like a gun or anything, so you have to get to explain what it is to all your friends.

Cost: $23,000 to $35,000

For fashionable gals on the go who don’t understand science: Nutricosmetics.

Why: A recent trend piece sheds light on the new breed of edible concoctions that will make you beautiful with antioxidants and “minerals.”  These products are “ingenious–or ingeniously marketed,” “claim to enhance hair, skin and nails,” and “purportedly engineered to improve women’s skin elasticity and moisture.”  Can’t anyone tell me whether these products really work??

“But do the products work? Many doctors say no.” Oh.  That answers that.  Thanks!

One especially intriguing product is offered by fashion designer Norma Kamali.  “Ms. Kamali… sells olive oil, which she calls “liquid gold,” for $45 for 200 milliliters in her West 56th street store.”  Among its benefits: “You can brush your teeth with olive oil and cinnamon.”  Damn it!  All this time I’ve been brushing with sesame oil and marjoram.  Some other innovative tooth-brushing ideas you might want to try:

• fish past and coriander
• soy sauce and tarragon
• chicken stock and fenugreek
• truffle oil and Italian saffron (this one’s for high rollers.)

Cost: $45 for 200 milliliters of olive oil, or $851.71 a gallon.

For sensible people who know the value of a dollar: Valentino’s Timestrings Collection.

Why:  The shoes in Valentino’s new collection bear a stamped “numerical record of the amount of time it took to make each pair.”  “Time is the new luxury.’”  “At $1,295, that’s $34 an hour, if you break it down. And yes, it’s worth it.”  The people who write the blurbs in the Sunday Times have a tenacious grasp on which iindulgences are a “must-have” or “worth every penny.”  They must be so confused when they see someone walking into a Payless Shores or an Econo Lodge or something.  I’ve totally been meaning to spend two months’ worth of rent on a sandal, but I was never sure whether it was a good value in terms of production time broken down by hour.  Also I wouldn’t be able to pay rent for two months.  But I’m so reassured to know the people who bought it didn’t get ripped off.

Cost: $845 to $1995

For people who want to be creative but don’t know how: High-end footrest.

Why:  In a piece for the Home section, design expert Steven Sclaroff combs TriBeCa for the best footstools money can buy.  One highlight: a leather pig.  “‘It’s clearly not going to match any of your furniture,’ he said. ”Unless you are the exceptional owner of a suite of furniture shaped like livestock. But that’s the point: it’s a sculpture you put your feet on.’”  I think this gift would work best for someone who views mismatched furniture as the apex of subversive novelty, yet has never lived in a house where any of the furniture didn’t match.

Cost: $198 to $2,500

For parents who love, yet hate their kids:  Deluxe playhouse.

Why: Playhouses are getting more luxurious.  New models have amenities like hardwood floors, eight-foot ceilings, running water, mini-fridges, flat-screen TVs and air conditioning.  You can get one that matches your real house, or choose from more whimsical styles like “cottage” and “pirate ship.”  Kids appear to love them, but they are also a hit with adults.

“Apart from the open bar by the swimming pool, the main attraction at parties held at the Houston home of John Schiller, an oil company executive, and his wife, Kristi, a Playboy model turned blogger, is the $50,000 playhouse the couple had custom-built two years ago for their daughter, Sinclair.”  Oh, don’t give them short shrift.  I’m sure the real main attraction is the stimulating political debates and philosophical discussions.  (Also, I’m sure the music is incredible ~~*sarcasm*~~.)

“’I think of it as bling for the yard.’”  Since bling is typically defined as having miniature replicas made of your clothes and wearing them around your neck, this analogy makes perfect sense.

A retired executive officer observes that “I wanted to be able to go up there on Sunday morning and read The New York Times Magazine.”  What an image.  {Ring ring} “Oh nothing, just sitting in a house that’s an exact half-size version of my house, reading a New York Times article about myself sitting in a tiny house, drinking a beer, experiencing my life as a bewildering postmodern mise en abîme.  Same-old, same-old.  What about you?”

Cost: $2,450 to $200,000

For traditionalists who are also individualistic, and tactful, and super-tasteful: Jaeger-Lecoultre’s Reverso.

Why: It is “one of the truly classic watches,” a “timeless [icon] of the watchmaker’s art, having been “born on the polo fields of 1930’s India.”    “‘The watch is pure.’”  It can be customized, thus allowing you to “be part of history”: For instance, “King Edward VIII of Britain, who abdicated in 1936 to marry the divorced American Wallis Simpson, had the royal crest inscribed on his Reverso.”

This year’s models (if you didn’t know watches came in model years, you’re probably the kind of ignoramus who doesn’t even know what a tourbillon is) include the “‘Tribute to 1931′ watch [which] runs with a Jaeger-LeCoultre Caliber 822 ultra-thin, manually wound movement, manufactured in-house, that measures just 2.94 millimeters,” and the Reverso Répétition Minutes à Rideau, which “reinvents the traditional function of the protective case back, turning it into a sliding curtain that activates the watch’s chimes.”

Didn’t know a watch could do all that, did you?  (If you’re asking “Do all what?”, go away, philistine.)  But the watches’ mechanical ingenuity pales in comparison to the powerful message conveyed by their design.

“Both watches, meanwhile, speak to a rediscovered awareness, among the wealthy, of the charms of discretion in an age of austerity.  ‘During turbulent socioeconomic times, the wealthy don’t necessarily want to flaunt their wealth.’”  If you’re tired of people flaunting their wealth, and want your loved ones to start flaunting the discretion with which they avoid flaunting their wealth instead, this is the gift for you.

Cost:  All the websites just say “Request Price.”

For the guy/gal who has everything: Beautiful boxes.

Why: If someone can afford to buy anything she wants, your only chance to impress them is with unique packaging.  For instance, the new Colosimo safe from Döttling is inspired by 1920′s safes.  Most people like to leave them open “‘to look at the mechanism.’”  A more ladylike option is suggested by Lee Siegelson, an estate jeweler who has such items for sale as a 1930′s platinum, diamond and sapphire Cartier cigarette case. “For a truly over-the-top gesture, Mr. Siegelson suggests using the cases…as unconventional gift-wrapping. ‘What a romantic gesture.’”  How romantic!  Whats in there?  Cocaine, right?

Cost: $23,800 for the safe, $100,000 to $125,000 for the cases.

For the less well-off:  A private jet.

Why: This article on kids who take private jets to summer camp was one of the Times‘ most talked about stories of the year.  And for good reason: It gave some fantastic money-saving tips.

“Parents said round-trip commercial flights from the New York area to Portland, Me., on peak weekends… could cost $500 to $600, even when bought well in advance. Mr. Rome, the Blue Star Jets president, said families could rent a seven-person turboprop plane starting at $3,800 for a round trip in one day, making the price competitive with some commercial flights. ‘You don’t have to be a millionaire to do it.’”

If you friend or loved on is struggling in today’s challenging economy, gift her with a turboprop PC-12 or Cissna Citation Excel.  Voila: Your friend can save hundreds by avoiding commercial flights!  And who needs a job, when you can clean up thousands in one weekend just by renting out seats to hot New England destinations?

Cost: $3,000,000 to $16,000,000

Total Cost: $3,024,090 to $16,378,271.15, but the experience of spreading holiday cheer is of course priceless.

Class War Quote of the Year:  “Mr. Grieff clarified: ‘From the Hamptons’ refers to people whose parents had a summer home there as a child, not to duck farmers.”  (“Dress Code in New York Clubs.”)

Grinch of the Year Award:  This award goes to Jim Windolf, who observed that “You can’t help wondering whether a full-fledged depression might be the only real cure for what ails us.”  (“Panning Salon.”)  Merry Christmas!