this is what concerns me:

This Old Gray Lady piece on bias against female playwrights presents some interesting facts — not least of which is this one that touches on a theme I’ve been batting around since high school. Namely, that girls are huge bitches to other girls.

Ms. Sands sent identical scripts to artistic directors and literary managers around the country. The only difference was that half named a man as the writer (for example, Michael Walker), while half named a woman (i.e., Mary Walker). It turned out that Mary’s scripts received significantly worse ratings in terms of quality, economic prospects and audience response than Michael’s. The biggest surprise? “These results are driven exclusively by the responses of female artistic directors and literary managers,” Ms. Sands said.

Amid the gasps from the audience, an incredulous voice called out, “Say that again?”

Ms. Sands put it another way: “Men rate men and women playwrights exactly the same.”

You know, blah blah patriarchy creates social structures in which women turn on other women, breaking apart the power of the sisterhood in order to divide and conquer blah blah. Anyway, I’d love to see the results of an economic study like this done on comics by women… I imagine they might be a bit different.

No, not actually for kids. Well, maybe. I don’t know. It’s Tuesday, give me a fucking break.

Researchers learned that ants that perform specific tasks are no more efficient than regular ants. “It turns out,” said scientist Anna Dornhaus, “that the ones that are specialized on a particular job are not particularly good at doing that job.” … Ann Coulter had her mouth wired shut. … Planned Parenthood of Indiana announced plans to offer holiday gift certificates that can be applied toward the cost of checkups, contraception, or abortions. “They deserve coal in their stockings,” said Sister Diane Carollo of the Indianapolis Archdiocese.

And on that whole Wal-Mart stampede thing:

“It was crazy,” said a worker in the electronics department. “The deals weren’t even that good.”

I don’t read Jezebel, but I do subscribe to their Joan Didion tag. This is what Sadie Stein had to report back from Didion’s “cold, detached” presence at last week’s New York Review of Books panel.

She started by describing the “unexpressable uneasiness” she and some others had felt early on in the campaign. Why? “We were getting what we wanted,” she continued, meaning, a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person’s candidate, “a generational thing we couldn’t understand” and the unthinking embrace of “naivete transformed to hope, partisanism as consumerism.” Didion bridled at the wanton use of “transformational” and said she couldn’t count the number of times she heard the 60’s evoked “by people who apparently had no memory that the 60s” didn’t involve decking babies out in political onesies.

Didion was at pains to say that she did not think any of this was Obama’s doing, nor to his tastes. He would, she speculated “welcome healthy realism” and achievable expectations. In our frenzy, we are doing him a disservice, expecting miracles “at a time when the nation can least afford easy answers.” She recalled, the day after the election, an overexcited newscaster declaring that we now possess “the congratulations of all the nations.” She likened this to the naivete of thinking we’d be regarded as beloved saviors in Iraq. But, she ended, “in the irony-free zone that our country has become, this is not what people wanted to hear.”

Sorry, you can go back to worshiping your Hope posters now, kids.

“The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.” –Bloomberg

If you’ve led a life like mine, rich in shame and filth, there are few opportunities for being sanctimonious and you have to seize those that offer themselves quickly.

– Another journo goes vegan and rails about how tough his life was without bloody shanks in perhaps the douchiest display yet (think: Bourdain forced to eat curry for a week and then waxing whiny about it to some 150 wpm assistant); but perhaps because he’s British (and employed by the Guardian) the humor makes up for some of the whine. Still, dude could use a cookie.

I had the fortunate occasion to overhear both of these gems today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A mom to her 4-year-old boy in the Africa & Americas galleries: Joey, listen to me, all right? There are some places in the world where people aren’t ashamed of showing their penises.

A mom to her 8-year-old girl, on Sol Lewitt’s 13/3 sculpture: You could build that with your Jenga, couldn’t you?

I also saw two different security guards leaning against walls taking naps — perhaps to lull passersby into a false sense of security about their embarrassing snippets of conversation. Very clever.

This week’s installment of Harper’s Findings is pretty sexy. (This is their science column, not to be confused with the weekly news report.)

Half of all women were estimated to have no G-spot … An Australian study reported that college students make up 40 percent of Melbourne’s prostitutes … A sex hormone was found in the drinking water of San Francisco, and anti-anxiety medications were found in the drinking water of Southern California … A Scottish study determined that roughly half of a person’s happiness is due to genetics … Honeybees can recognize individual human faces.

It must be swarming season!

The Harper’s Weekly Review newsletter always brightens my mid-week. This is just a taste of why, from the May 20th edition:

A 19-year-old college freshman was elected mayor of Muskogee, Oklahoma. “Right now I’m between girlfriends,” said John Tyler Hammons, who is president of both the Young Republicans and the Young Democrats at his university. “I’m looking to fill that position.” … The Vatican’s chief astronomer said that it’s not a contradiction of faith to believe in aliens and that we may have intelligent, God-created “extraterrestrial brothers.” … U.S. Air Force pilots were testing the Advanced Mission Extender Device, the result of a $5 million program to replace unhygienic “piddle packs” with a system that converts urine into a gel. Los Angeles was considering whether to turn its raw sewage into drinking water.

All right, move along, back to work.

My dad on IM:

you wouldn’t do well, there isn’t much respect for vegans here
I learned that China has a national pork reserve
in deep frozen caves, like our national oil reserve
they keep adding to it, doomsday pork
they love their pork
the students all rush up and ask me to draw pigs for them
I ask why always pigs?
They say, we think pigs are funny.
(and tasty)

On his process: “Sometimes I just sit on the couch, and if I look out the window and see a fat guy with bloody knuckles and curlers in his hair spitting, I start to think, ‘Wow, what does that guy do for a living? What do his kids look like?’ It just happens like that.”