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Everyone's favorite professionally precocious child-love-doctor, Alec Greven, and everyone's favorite self-serving, Emmy-winning comedy-writer are teaming up to share their combined life wisdom in a rom-com sure to involve man-children learning valuable life lessons from adorable smart-asses! Can we get an "oy vey?" More »
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What are my hypothetical "dealbreakers"? I didn't think I had any, until this fellow I know emailed me with a link to the story that sits atop the New York Times Most Emailed list. The story is about "literary dealbreakers," which is to say, "books that are bonerkillers" or "It's Not Me, It's Your Books." Now: there is little in the way of reading material I hold in lower esteem than the New York Times' Most Emailed List, whose prominence on the New York Times homepage — in addition to the internal and circlejerkospheric prestige a writer earns when she or he writes a story that finds its way onto the list — serves not only as an important signifier of the wanton consumerism to which the once-great news gathering institution has succumbed, but a shameless perpetuator of said consumerism. Migraines! Maureen Dowd! Shamu! Oh yes, and also: "People in New York are detestable in every way; come, let us count them!" Today in class: your one-night stand is judging your book collection. More »
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"Had I fallen into that New York City long con, the one where you think there is an infinite supply of potential mates, and the perfect one is forever around the corner?" This sentence is perhaps the most telling line of yesterday's NY Times "Modern Love" column, by Daily Show creator and author Ben Karlin, about his romantic journey. See, Ben Karlin is not responsible for his actions. Ben Karlin had simply fallen prey to the same disease that had seized so many of his other, maybe even older male friends in New York whereby their brains somehow do not process other people as actually being people. They are more like complex illiquid financial instruments that are difficult to value. Someone from somewhere else (not New York) might mistake such an affliction as basic inhumanity, the type responsible for slavery/genocide/ child molestation/etc. But New Yorkers, unsentimental followers of pop sociology that they are, know better. More »
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A few weeks ago, a talented writer named Emily Gould submitted a review of a "lad lit" anthology called Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me. The editor of the book is Daily Show/Colbert co-creator Ben Karlin. Wow! I thought upon reading the review. Men sure are jerks! In fact, I ventured further, maybe the men who would seem not to be jerks are the biggest jerks of all! I tucked the review away, wondering if maybe Emily could do something to "advance" this argument. Well, guess what happened in the intervening weeks? Well, for one, Emily's ex-boyfriend wrote an incredibly terrible essay about her in Page Six Magazine. The story was exactly like something out of Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me in that purported to convey how the author learned some sort of life lesson from a failed relationship but actually just made him look like a more self-obsessed prick than anyone thought he was in the first place. (But: it was also really bad.) And then! The editor of the anthology in question, Ben Karlin, turned out to be a really big jerk, according to this New York Observer story about how he screwed this guy* who moved into his building. You know what? I thought. Fuck it, my argument just advanced itself. Things Emily learned from Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me after the jump. More »
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