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Harper Lee, the author of the 1960 classic To Kill a Mockingbird, announced on Tuesday that she will release a second novel this summer.

88-year-old Lee, who is notoriously private and does not give many interviews, has not been working on an entirely new novel. Instead, she will release a previously  unpublished work completed before To Kill a Mockingbird titled Go Set a Watchman. According to the AP, this is a novel that Lee started in the 1950s, set aside, and has since returned to and finished.

Lee said in a statement to her publisher Harper that the novel is a kind of prequel to Scout's story, and that the manuscript had been previously misplaced.

"In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called `Go Set a Watchman,' It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout's childhood, persuaded me to write a novel (what became `To Kill a Mockingbird') from the point of view of the young Scout.

"I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn't realized it (the original book) had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years."

Go Set a Watchman will be released on July 14.

Excellent news for anyone "working" from home on today's snow day. The Internet Archive has brought online free, browser-playable versions of classic MS-DOS games.

The Oregon Trail is an obvious candidate for whiling your day away.

Definitely not my first time

I'm also a big fan of Koei's war simulation games like L'Empereur and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. And who can forget Kings Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella or the original Sim City?

(via Abby Olheiser)

Calorie labels can be a little bit useless.

Yes, they do contain a number that indicates the amount of energy contained in a given food. But the units of measurement are unfamiliar and difficult to parse. What does 250 calories in one soda actually mean?

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University wanted to see what would happen if they made calorie labels more blunt — specifically, if the labels told consumers how much exercise it would take to burn off the energy in a soda.

They went into Baltimore and put up signs in six corner stores' fridges, right where the drinks were. They said it would take 50 minutes of running or 5 miles of walking to burn off the 250 calories in a 16-ounce soda. And they waited, over six weeks, to see if shoppers made different decisions.

Here's what happened among the teenagers who shopped at these convenience stores: they bought fewer sodas. Results published this week in the American Journal of Public Health show that consumption of sports drinks such as Gatorade went down as well.

(American Journal of Public Health)

At the same time that teens were buying fewer sodas, they were also more likely to purchase water — or leave the store with no drink at all.

In exit interviews, about one-third of those surveyed said that they noticed the signs. And among those, 40 percent say it changed their decision about what they would buy at the store. Those who did still buy sodas tended to buy smaller bottles than they did before the signs went up.

This suggests a relatively easy way to make calorie labels, which are becoming more ubiquitous, more powerful. The Affordable Care Act mandates that all chain restaurants with 10 or more locations post calorie information about their standard food items. But most research shows that these listings don't change consumers' behavior.

One study looked at New York City's calorie labeling law, which went into effect in 2008. It compared New Yorkers' consumption of fast food after those labels went up to that of residents of nearby Newark.

If the calorie labels made a difference, you would expect to see declines in New Yorkers' calorie consumption while Newark residents' consumption remained constant. But that didn't happen: while the researchers did find that about half of New Yorkers noticed the labels, there was no statistically significant change in how they ate.

(Health Affairs)

What makes the new research encouraging is that it suggests a way to make the numbers on calorie labels more meaningful. "These results might also be relevant to other local or state initiatives in various settings (convenience stores, vending machines in schools or workplaces) that require point-of-purchase information," the authors write.

And, on a more personal note, this new study will make me think twice about grabbing the 50-minute run bags of Cheez-Its in Vox's office.

Incidentally, today is World Mental Health Day 2014. This year’s World Mental Health Day shines a light on schizophrenia. At least 26 million people are living with schizophrenia worldwide according to the World Health Organization, and many more are indirectly affected by it.

Recent scientific research shows that people in artistic or scientific professions (dancers, researchers, artists, photographers) more often than the general population suffer from mental illness, with a significant connection between writers and schizophrenia.

Patient: “Sometimes I think the wall is moving.” Doctor: “Cut down on drinking.”

For the study, researchers tracked almost 1.2 million patients and their relatives, identified down to second-cousin level.

The findings reveal that bipolar disorder is more prevalent in the entire group. 

Authors, however, more commonly suffer from the other mental disorders — including schizophrenia, depression, anxiety syndrome and substance abuse — and are almost 50 percent more likely to commit suicide than the general population.

Creative professions are more common in the relatives of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anorexia nervosa and, to some extent, autism.

The findings suggest that mental disorders should be viewed in a new light.

“If one takes the view that certain phenomena associated with the patient’s illness are beneficial, it opens the way for a new approach to treatment,” said Simon Kyaga, consultant in psychiatry and doctoral student at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

“In that case, the doctor and patient must come to an agreement on what is to be treated, and at what cost. In psychiatry and medicine generally there has been a tradition to see the disease in black-and-white terms and to endeavor to treat the patient by removing everything regarded as morbid.”

Here is an excerpt from Schizotypy, Flow, and the Artist’s Experience, an article in Psychology Today:

In a recent study reported in Schizophrenia Bulletin, Nelson and Rawlings propose that a mild form of schizophrenia called schizotypy may be positively associated with the experience of creative flow. Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental illness that affects roughly 1% of the population and involves altered states of consciousness and “abnormal” perceptual experiences. Schizotypy, which is a watered-down version of schizophrenia, consists of a constellation of personality traits that are evident in some degree in everyone.

Do you have any of the following “traits”?

• A cold or inappropriate affect
• Anhedonia
• Odd or eccentric behaviour
• A tendency to social withdrawal
• Paranoid or bizarre ideas not amounting to true delusions
• Obsessive ruminations
• Thought disorder and perceptual disturbances
• Occasional transient quasi-psychotic episodes with intense illusions, auditory or other hallucinations, and delusion-like ideas, usually occurring without external provocation

Are you going mad? You might check you eves. Might as well, you are a schizotypical creative genius experiencing a flow. Have fun while it lasts!

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber's off-the-cuff comments about Obamacare's subsidies are the exception that proves the rule: they're getting so much attention precisely because they're the only example where anyone even appears to believe that Congress, without telling anyone, decided to turn Obamacare into an absolute disaster by withholding subsidies from states that didn't set up their own insurance exchanges.

The result is perverse: in recent days, Gruber's comments are getting more attention than testimony from the Democratic and Republican congressional aides who wrote the bill. They're getting more attention than what the Congressional Budget Office (which Gruber advised) was told by Congress. They're getting more attention than the recollections of the very best reporters who covered Obamacare — notably Sarah Kliff and Julie Rovner. They're getting more attention than the debate in every state that chose to use a federal exchange. They're getting more attention than the way the Obama administration understood (and implemented) the law. They're getting more attention than the way the Supreme Court interpreted the law in 2012.

Gruber's comments aren't getting so much attention because anyone actually believes them

They're getting more attention, in fact, than everything else Gruber has ever said or written about the law. This is a guy who cared so deeply about Obamacare's success that he literally published a comic book about it. His most important contribution to the Obamacare debate — technical simulations used by HHS that modeled how many people would get insurance under different scenarios — always assumed subsidies reached into every state. No journalist who interviewed Gruber (myself included) ever heard him mention that states that don't set up exchanges don't receive subsidies. He himself says he never believed that and the off-the-cuff comments were "speak-os".

This is like uncovering tape of Michael Bay saying there's nothing he hates seeing more in a movie than an explosion. It requires us to throw out pretty much everything Gruber has done publicly and instead believe that he thought dozens of states would be implementing Obamacare without subsidies — a nightmare of a policy outcome that would have given him a nervous breakdown — but the only times he ever mentioned it were at two Q&A sessions in 2012.

Gruber's comments aren't getting so much attention because anyone actually believes them. They're getting so much attention because some people want other people to believe them.

The real Obamacare debate

Jon Gruber’s Obamacare comic book weirdly left out that Jon Gruber thought Obamacare dozens of states wouldn’t get subsidies. (Scan by Harold Pollack)

It would be much simpler if the argument about Obamacare could simply be about what it's actually about: some people believe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a good law. Others believe it's a bad law and they would like to see it repealed.

The problem is that the people who believe it's a bad law haven't won the elections necessary to repeal it. So they've turned, in desperation, to the courts. But the Supreme Court doesn't strike laws down for being bad. It strikes them down for being unconstitutional, or incomprehensible. And that's forced Obamacare's critics to make some very weird and very weak arguments.

The Halbig challenge has led to one of those arguments. There's a version of this challenge that makes some sense. The argument is that Democrats, in their haste to pass the bill, worded a key sentence poorly. Congress's intent is perfectly clear in the law but the Supreme Court's five Republican appointees should rely on a "plain text" reading of the law as an excuse to gut the bill. (As is often the case in legal fights over politically polarized topics, opinions on the legal question are driven by opinions on the political question: I have yet to find anyone who believes the Supreme Court should rule for Halbig who doesn't also believe Obamacare should be repealed.)

This is less a serious theory about Obamacare than an attempt to pull off a Jedi mind trick.

But Obamacare's opponents don't feel very good about making that case. It sounds too much like winning by cheating. And what are conservatives who previously condemned "legislating from the bench" to say if the Supreme Court's five Republican appointees overrule Congress's clear intent so they can take health-insurance subsidies away from millions of people?

And so a stronger version of the Halbig claim has emerged: that Congress really did intend to withhold subsidies from states that didn't set up their own exchanges — they just didn't tell anybody or ever debate it, no journalists or health wonks found out about it during the legislative process, and no one involved in the writing of the bill thought to mention it while Obamacare was being implemented. This is less a serious theory about Obamacare than an attempt to pull off a Jedi mind trick.

This stronger version of Halbig was mostly ignored until Gruber's comments: his remarks are the first that even plausibly seem like they back this thesis, despite the fact that they're not reflected in any of Gruber's work and Gruber says he misspoke.

But then the point isn't that anyone actually believes the stronger version of the Halbig claim. Rather, there are a lot of people who believe Obamacare is a bad law, and right now, pretending to believe the more ridiculous version of Halbig seems like the most promising path to wounding it. And so here we are.

This post was originally published on September 2, 2013.

Year: 2013
Place: London
Smaller place: The English Tea Room at Brown’s
Smallest place: A table for three, with the couple seated next to each other, sweetly, and the reporter across.

REPORTER: What changes these last few years have wrought!

BENEDICT: I can hardly believe it.

NICOLE: Nor I.

REPORTER: How did this all come about? How did such a young Canadian woman manage to become the creator of a relatively high-production-value television program in the UK while editing a popular ladyblog?

BENEDICT: Wymyn’s blog.

REPORTER: Yes, of course. Wymyn’s power blog.

NICOLE: Oh, it’s all a blur, really. (sips tea) Who knows how it started, at this point? Let’s just pick things up as I began shooting on the first season of Sherlock.

REPORTER: That pilot episode was exquisite.

NICOLE: Thank you.

REPORTER: And the second episode of the first season, which really cemented the show’s popularity, for which you took “The Red-Headed League” as your inspiration…is it true that you scrapped what had been originally planned to run in its stead? A crimson-lit blur of Asian drug smugglers and organized crime which inexplicably represented a significant departure in quality from the rest of the series?

BENEDICT: We spent a LOT of time discussing Orientalism together. We spent an entire weekend in Yorkshire, chastely sharing a crofter’s cottage, making thoughtful and informed creative choices, and decided to fire that writer and write our own script.

REPORTER: So, you were not yet lovers.

BENEDICT AND NICOLE: (staring intently at each other) Not yet, no.

NICOLE: I thought he was pretty freaky-looking for the whole first season, to be honest.

BENEDICT: That’s pretty common, because I have such a weird-looking face and very little muscle tone.

NICOLE: And, of course, I was devoted to the memory of my late husband.

REPORTER: Yes, how long had he been dead at this point?

NICOLE: (firmly) Thirty years.

REPORTER: Such a long time for you to have been devoted to his memory, especially considering you are now only twenty-eight years old yourself.

BENEDICT: Although I was in love with her instantly–helplessly and passionately in love–and texted her constantly to ask about her day or to compliment her on her writing or to share great lines she already knew from 30 Rock, I knew she was so loyal to the memory of her late husband and focused on the show that there was little chance we could be together.

NICOLE: My real priority was also the well-being of my child, but as the first season drew to a close, she accepted a postdoc in theoretical condensed matter physics at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and I began to think…perhaps it was time to be a woman again, not just Helen Reddy singing “Candle on the Water” in Pete’s Dragon.

BENEDICT: You always have the best references. (ruffles her hair)

REPORTER: It was, legendarily, during the filming of “A Scandal in Belgravia” that your relationship became overtly sexual, yes?

NICOLE: Yes. I had decided to play Irene Adler, of course.

REPORTER: Such a brave choice, considering you are not particularly attractive, and have never acted nor shown any aptitude for it.

NICOLE: Yes, we’d run into a budget snafu, and I knew that the only way I could afford to do “The Reichenbach Fall” in the manner of my choosing was to avoid paying an outside actress to be Irene earlier in the season.

REPORTER: You were sensational. A revelation. You looked incredible. I especially enjoyed how you found an opportunity to show off your equestrian skills, and also did thirty pushups in that one scene which called for it. It added so much to the idea of Irene’s competence and more muscular, outdoorsy attractiveness.

BENEDICT: The original script, although nearly perfect, called for SHERLOCK to save IRENE, but after thinking what sort of message that would send young women, and how it would pollute the original text, we messed it around a bit and it was eventually Irene’s devotion to physical fitness which kept Sherlock from decapitation.

REPORTER: The bit with the phone was the same, of course.

BENEDICT: You see, that’s how I knew she had fallen in love with me, finally.

REPORTER: You mean–

BENEDICT: Yes. The scene where I hold her hand and am surreptitiously taking her pulse? That day, on the set, was how I realized she reciprocated my love. Just like her character! The minute we wrapped on the episode, we blew out of town and spent the next two weeks tearing each other UP in a really classy hotel.

REPORTER: That is a love story for all time.

NICOLE: We think so.

REPORTER: But, despite the love you two share, which is both aggressively physical and also spiritual and a creative partnership, if anything, the show just gets gayer.

NICOLE: Absolutely.

REPORTER: Do you think that will change?

BENEDICT: The third season is to be the gayest yet.

REPORTER: Then your reported regular threesomes with Martin Freeman are –

BENEDICT: Are for creative purposes, yes. But not without their charmingly shy and tender charms.

NICOLE: Oh, Benny, we have to go. You’re shooting that three-episode arc on Scandal this week.

REPORTER: Do you always travel together for work?

BENEDICT: What can I say? I’m one of those men who cannot bear to be parted from my beloved. Even if I’m just making sure our DVR is recording her favourite shows while she’s blow-drying her hair, that’s perfect happiness for me.

BENEDICT AND NICOLE: (begin making out)

REPORTER: (picks up the check and casually slips off)

Read more Benedict Cumberbatch: The Fan Fiction at The Toast.

An anonymous angel from New York delivered a wonderful public service today: "a phone line that automatically reads quotations from bell hooks." From our savior, via email:

The idea came to me after the NYPost printed bikini photos of the woman who "spurned" Elliot Rodgers. Despite the fact that she was only 10 years old at the time they met, she was portrayed as having romantically rejected Rodgers.

The idea is to pass that off as one's own number if you're in a dicey situation, afraid to give out your personal cell phone number or outright reject somebody. The number is 669-221-6251. (We originally wanted 669/UGH-ASIF, but it was taken…)

It will automatically respond to text messages as well as calls! That way, you don't have to deal with a threatening person, *and* they get some free feminist lessons thrown in.

We are thinking of putting up a gmail account too, which would automatically respond with "Thank you for your note. However, I am away on vacation — from the patriarchy."

Give it a try, and then promptly memorize the number: 669-221-6251. [Feminist Phone Intervention, screengrab via Bitch Media]

In the 17th century, a Dutch artist by the name of none other than "A. Boogert" hand-painted an 800-page guide to mixing watercolors; here's just one page out of the beautiful Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau. The diligence of it all! You think if "A. Boogert" were alive today he'd be just another asshole exasperatedly closing Instagram if it takes even a second to load? More from the book here, and although the server's crashing currently the entire manuscript is online for your eventual viewing pleasure.

(Related, from 2011: my favorite remix of "Colours.")

It’s true! Whatever monster, specter, obsession is haunting you right now? It lives in your very own head. Which means it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it. Dress it up in your grandmother’s hat, put roller skates on all of its legs, shrink it down to 1/10^th of its present size — absolutely anything.

We get this mixed up sometimes, I think. Something huge rears its ugly head in our heads and we’re like “Aaagh! Something bad is happening and there’s nothing I can do!” And we hunker down and cower in the corner until it’s over.

But there IS something you can do. It’s your monster, so talk to it. Work with it. Make it do your bidding.

I know that some monsters are massive and terrifying and you might need some help to deal with them. But honestly? Most of them are pretty standard issue, nothing special about them — we just picked them up from living at this place and time in history. Like, I dunno, obsession with one’s thigh size, or paranoia at what other people are thinking about you and your life choices, or thinking you’re an incompetent fraud and it’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out.

These kinds of insecurities have been drilled into our heads from the moment we arrived on this planet, but they are not accurate reflections of reality, right? I mean, your thighs are just thighs. And even if someone is judging you, are you really going to live according to their judgements? And you’re not a fraud, you’re just lacking confidence because you were raised to believe that fitting in is more important than courage.

And you know all this, of course, but these monsters are still real, and sometimes they still flare up, and in that moment it is very easy to allow them to take possession of your body. But this is the thing we are trying to avoid — shutting down and letting them take control. Because they can do a lot of damage … plus once they get going, it’s hard to quiet them down again.

So what can you do? Well, first, try to understand them. Try to keep them calm as much as possible. And when they do rise up, do your best to limit the detonation radius. Remember that they belong to you, they live inside your head, and they are, in fact, your responsibility.

The cool thing is, by learning to deal with your own, you become better able to deal with other people’s, too. You don’t take them so personally. And you become a shining example of what it looks like someone has a small, chilled-out monster entourage (it looks pretty good).

Life becomes a thousand times easier when you stop fearing and fighting the contents of your own head. It works a lot better to acknowledge that there’s some weird shit in there, and try to get to know how it operates. What triggers it? What quiets it down?

You are bigger than your monsters. You can handle them.

Previously: The Confidence Pie

Ann Friedman will get back to you when she figures it out.

Ahhh, what a perfect infographic. I'm pretty into the 1939 Bette Davis number, and of course Cher's insane Bob Mackie. What are your favorites? Via MediaRun.

After an exhaustive and comprehensive study, doctors have finally been able to pin down the vague but persistent set of symptoms plaguing everyone and come to the surprising conclusion that every single American human suffers from seasonal depression.

“It’s true,” Dr. Kim Bass, the lead scientist in the study announced dully from a podium, “not that it does anyone much good to know it. But now you know it. Everyone has it. That sinking feeling in your heart when you start to notice the sun setting at four in the afternoon? The early-morning nausea that keeps you from getting out of bed? The seizing, flushing, frenzied attacks that grip you alone in the car as you barrel down the road in the dark to your windowless office building; that’s seasonal depression, and you have it, and everyone has it, even the people in Hawaii have it, they just don’t know it yet.”

“Everybody has it and nothing’s any good.”

Scientists were at a loss when it came to practical treatments. “I guess we could just move,” Dr. Bass said quietly, as if only to herself, hunched over a chair mechanically eating a peanut butter and Fluff sandwich, “but where would we go?” She burst into tears. “Our whole lives are here.”

“Those stupid lamps don’t do anything,” she added, folding the rest of the sandwich into her mouth and gesturing furiously at a very expensive, carefully calibrated light therapy chamber. “It’s a stupid fucking lamp. It’s not the sun. It’s not summer. It’s not anything.”

“It’s not anything,” she concluded, before burning the rest of her lab notes for warmth.

Read more Doctors Diagnose 100% of Americans With Seasonal Affective Disorder at The Toast.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Crush their fucking heads.

Previous installments of Kids in the Hall Monday can be found here. Most recently: Fine Ham Abounds.

Read more “Head Crusher,” Kids in the Hall at The Toast.

According to a report by a state legislative analyst, it would be feasible to split California into six smaller states, although the process would be complicated. The news was reportedly received with great excitement by supporters of a proposed “Six Californias” amendment – and there is at least one supporter, a “multimillionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist” named Tim Draper, who said in an email after the report’s release,

“It is obvious that we need a breath of fresh air in California government, and creating six new states allows the refresh we need … California, as it is, is ungovernable. We need our state governments to be local to us.”

It’s so inspiring to know that one wealthy douchebag with a pet project that seems doomed to irrelevance can nonetheless move his idea far enough to get the state to spend money on researching it. Seems like an excellent use of state funds in pursuit of a small-government agenda.

The report also predicted that the new states would be wildly unequal, with two of the new states becoming much richer and four of them becoming poorer. Not surprisingly, the teabaggers behind secession for a Northern chunk of the state think that’s a nifty idea, even though their new state, “Jefferson,” would have a tiny population, little tax base, and would be one of the new poorer states. See, they don’t need no government teat, and secession leader Mark Baird is sure that, once freed from the oppression of Sacramento, the new state could eliminate regulations and taxes and attract industry that will make everyone in Jefferson Gulch happy and rich:

“We aren’t worried about the economy at all,” said Mr. Baird. “The way we figure it, we would create a state with a favorable regulatory and tax climate. We wouldn’t be driving business out with a stick; we would set up a business climate where they could prosper.”

Free acid rain and chemical spills for everyone!

The report indicated that the split would actually increase income disparities between the new states — since most of the state’s wealth is concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, the new state of “Silicon Valley” would instantly have the highest per capita income in the USA, and the new states’ tax bases would be completely out of whack with each other. Silicon Valley and Northern California would have free healthcare on high-speed library trains, and the other states would be lucky to keep gas in the Highway Patrol cars. Again, that’s perfectly fine with the libertarian doofuses pushing the plan:

Mr. Draper said support for the six-state concept is highest in Central California and Jefferson because “the existing state is not working for them.”

“Of course, we expect all six states to get richer because governments will be more in touch with their citizens,” Mr. Draper said.

The beautiful free market will make everyone so prosperous! And if it doesn’t, they can always split the six new states into twenty or thirty smaller ones, so freedom can finally do its magic.

For Mr. Baird, that’s the beauty of the six Californias proposal: bringing government closer to the people it represents.

“When you ask people here about this, they tell you, ‘If I could live in a free state, I’d live with a few more potholes and some used equipment,’” said Mr. Baird. “We need representation. We’ll figure the rest of it out.”

Even in the unlikely event that enough brown acid is injected into reservoirs to make voters pass the amendment, the proposal to split up California would have to be approved by Congress; hard to say how they’d feel about the sudden addition of 10 new U.S. Senators and some additional states that would suddenly need bailing out (oh, of course they wouldn’t, because free market magic). In any case, it’s inspiring to see all this effort on behalf of an unworkable scheme that will never pass, because it proves that government has to deal with whatever terrible ideas people can get on the ballot.

[Washington Times]

Via Complex, here is a promising campaign to make wine condoms a part of all our lives, should we want them to be. Wine condoms are exactly what they sound like: nice little protective devices that will cover your half-empty (mostly empty) bottle, preventing us from having to mess with a bunch of winey Saran Wrap that sort of starts to levitate away from the bottle, or a stopper that makes the wine too tall to fit on your refrigerator shelf or whose cork breaks off and crumbles into the rest of your beverage, which happened to me two days ago. Wine condoms!

Related: three-piece formal condoms.

Previously in this series: How To Tell If You Are In A Brontë Novel.

1. Everyone you know respects you. This disgusts you.

2. The door is white and the day is hot. This pleases you.

3. A Jewish man believes you are his friend. This disgusts you.

4. You are a man. A man! A man is a man like a tree is a tree.

5. A Greek man is shouting incomprehensibly at you. This is why you are drunk.

6. You have lost something in a war. This is why you are drunk.

7. A woman is looking at you. She is wearing her hat in a manner you find unbearably independent and mannish. You despise her.

8. You are standing on top of a mountain. The mountain admires you for climbing it. You do not care what the mountain thinks of you, and you light a cigar. The cigar admires you for smoking it. You sneer casually at the sun. Somewhere there is a white door.

9. You are shooting a large animal but thinking about a woman. You cannot shoot her. This infuriates you.

10. You met a homosexual once in Paris. It took you two years snowshoeing across the backcountry in Michigan to recover.

11. You have said goodbye to a young girl with a white face on a black train. You are ready to die.

12. Waiter bring me another rum

13. You hate every single one of your friends. You have no friends. You are alone at sea. How you hate the sea, but how you respect the fish inside of it. How you hate the kelp. How indifferent you are to the coral.

14. Your stomach hurts; that is how you know you are alive.

15. You are standing in a river and something is coming to kill you. You will welcome it with open arms and a booming laugh when it comes.

Read more How To Tell If You’re In A Hemingway Novel at The Toast.

Social scientists working on a decades-long population study have recently concluded that every single living resident of the United States suffers from a condition known as imposter syndrome, a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments, except for you, an actual fraud who is almost certainly on the verge of being found out by the people who only think they love and respect you any day now.

“Despite external evidence of their competence,” sufferers of imposter syndrome “remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.” This is true of every adult you have ever come into personal and professional contact with over the course of your (duplicitous and underhanded) life; every one of them is selling him- or herself short and being far too hard on themselves. By an odd coincidence, every single American who isn’t you lives in a constant and unfounded state of self-recrimination and doubt for no good reason. The sole exception to this, once again, is of course you, whose occasional fits of self-loathing and doubt are in fact the only brushes with honesty you have ever experienced.

Imposter syndrome can be both dangerous and damaging to the psyche, scientists point out — except in your case — and sufferers should be aware of the several therapies available for treating their needless suffering. Living with imposter syndrome can cause an otherwise healthy, likable, competent person (with you, once again, proving the sole exception, as you only appear to be all of those things) to be unable to recognize their own inherent worth and suffer from needless feelings of inadequacy.

In your case, however, scientists point out that you are bound to be discovered and unmasked as soon as this week; it is only a matter of time before everyone turns on you.

Read more Everyone Has Imposter Syndrome Except For You at The Toast.

1. Claude and Eustace have been sent down from Oxford but refuse to leave your flat until they have made their professional debut on the West End, an aim to which your aunt strenuously objects. What do you feed the Empress?

If you feed the Empress acorns, select A. If you feed the Empress mash with a nip of bourbon, select B. 

2. You accidentally steal the umbrella of a social superior. Do you start a chicken farm or marry Muriel?

If you start a chicken farm, select A. If you marry Muriel, select B. 

3. Your Uncle Fred is masquerading as a beloved Russian novelist in a dining car containing half of the most important members of your gentleman’s club as well as your publisher, who currently has on his person a compromising letter that could end your literary career. What tie will you wear?

If you will wear the striped tie, select A. If you will wear the quiet grey, select B. 

4. The girl you love is engaged to the local squire. How many kippers would you like with your breakfast?

If you will have four kippers, select A. If you ask for kidneys, select B.

5. A small dog belonging to your second-least favorite aunt has stolen a constable’s helmet. Where will you hide?

If you will hide on Swan Island, select A. If you will hide in Roberta Wickham’s room, select B.

1A. You feed the Empress acorns. This fails to revive her, and Laura Pyke, the food crank, is called in for consultation. You are moved out of the Green Room — which has the nicest view in the whole house — to make room for her. The week-end has been ruined.
1B. You feed the Empress mash with a bit of bourbon. Although the Empress responds promisingly, while you are distracted by her, Roderick Spode takes the opportunity to ransack your room and plant the stolen cow-creamer under your bed. Gwladys refuses to believe that you are not a kleptomaniac and breaks off your engagement.

2A. Muriel objects to your starting a chicken farm, as she has always planned for you a career in Law, and brings breach-of-promise actions against you.
2B. Muriel has been secretly engaged to Tuppy Glossop for three years. He threatens to horsewhip you on the steps of your Club after learning of your attachment; you sail to America and spend six months in New York City trying to forget her. You forget her so successfully that when you meet her again — this time with dyed red hair as a gold-digging chorus girl — it takes you weeks to remember who she is. By this time she has married your wealthy uncle, giving him a son almost nine months to the date after their wedding, disinheriting you.

3A. You wear the striped tie. By curious coincidence, you bear a remarkable resemblance to the Canadian poet Rockmeteller Todd, who is also in the dining car, wearing a striped tie. You are invited to speak at a local primary school on the meaning of your best-known work, “Across the Pale Parabola of Joy.” Rockmeteller confesses to you in the drawing-room car that he has no intention of keeping that appointment and begs for you to go in his stead. All of the little girls have braids down their backs and goggle at you. Your Uncle Fred, meanwhile, slips off at the next stop and is arrested in London for nude bathing in the fountains at Trafalgar Square.
3B. You wear the quiet grey tie. Somehow, you find its subtle colors morally strengthening and finally draw enough courage to propose to Isobel Allsop, whom you have loved since she was so high. She accepts.

4A. You take four kippers. The kippers leave you full until lunch. It was just the right amount of kippers to have; what a flair you have in these matters.
4B. You ask for kidneys, inadvertently offending the sensitive French cook Anatole, who gives notice immediately. Your Aunt Dahlia disinvites you from her around-the-world yacht trip. The week-end has been ruined.

5A. You hide on Swan Island. It is filled with swans. The boat is gone, and you have no umbrella with which to defend yourself. It will take weeks for them to find your body.
5B. You hide in Roberta Wickham’s room. It is filled with swans. As they descend upon you, hissing curiously like the death-rattle of a soda-water syphon, you have only enough time to avoid Roberta’s Pomeranian, which begins snapping at your heels.

Read more Choose Your Own P.G. Wodehouse Adventure at The Toast.

Your passionate appeals to the rom-com gods have finally been answered: this year, a romantic comedy parody starring Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd will premiere at Sundance. It's called They Came Together, and it's directed by David Wain (of Wet Hot American Summer fame).

Read more...

By Ben Marks

Like a lot of people of a certain age, I’ll never forget the night I watched The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” It was February 9, 1964, I was 7 years old, and John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr had just invaded America. Coming scant months after the assassination of President Kennedy, the whole country (or at least 73 million television viewers) was ready for an evening of guilt-free fun.

“I used to watch them wiggle their butts on stage.”

Even more memorable was an afternoon a couple of years later, a day or two before August 29, 1966, when The Beatles were scheduled to play Candlestick Park, then the home of Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants. My friend Billy had offered me a ticket to the show, as well as a ride with his big brother. It was a done deal, all I had to do was say yes.

“No thanks,” I replied instead, with all the breezy hubris of your typical 10-year-old. “I’m into the Stones.”

We didn’t know it at the time, but that concert at Candlestick would be The Beatles’ last. Apparently, a lot of other people didn’t know it either: The show was not even close to sold-out.

Above: Female fans at Shea Stadium in New York, August 15, 1965. Photo: Robert Whitaker. Top: The Beatles played the Cow Palace in San Francisco on their 1964 North American tour. Photo: Mirrorpix.

With the golden anniversary of the Fab Four’s first visit to North America upon us, many are thinking about their half-century relationship with The Beatles, whether it’s the first time they heard “Tomorrow Never Knows,” that late night in their dorm room when they realized that Paul McCartney was singing the words “the doctor came in, stinking of gin” in “Rocky Raccoon,” or, as in my case, the fateful afternoon they decided not to see the band for free because of musical principles that now seem indefensible.

“John Lennon himself rebuffed Finley, saying, ‘Chuck, we only do 11. That’s it.’”

This month, a two-volume chronicle of The Beatles’ official tours in 1964, ’65, and ’66 called “Some Fun Tonight: The Backstage Story of How The Beatles Rocked America: The Historic Tours of 1964-1966” takes a behind-the-scenes look at Beatlemania back in the U.S. of A. The 618-page, hardbound boxed set, written by Chuck Gunderson and retailing for $175 (including postage in North America), tells the real story of what those tours were like in the words of the DJs, promoters, and people who were there, brought to life via some 450 photographs of the band performing their 11-song sets, giving increasingly impatient press conferences, and fleeing the affections of their frenzied fans.

Gunderson, who’s been working on the book for roughly eight years, had a harder time than he expected finding images to go with every city on each of the three tours. “One of the things that surprised me was how little photographic evidence exists of these tours,” he says. “You would think that with their international superstardom in ’65 and ’66, there’d be photos galore. But a lot of photographs had been stolen over the years out of newspaper archives. In the process of writing this book, we were actually able to save 54 negatives from the last show at Candlestick Park that were about to go on the black market. About seven or eight of them are now presented in the book and all are safely archived.”

Tickets for Beatles shows in 1964 at the Hollywood Bowl and 1965 at Shea Stadium.

Getting the stories right was often just as challenging. “It was endless phone calls and emails,” Gunderson says, “not just to get a story, but also to corroborate it, to make sure the stories matched up. I didn’t want the book to just be a bunch of facts and figures thrown around. I’m a trained historian, with a master’s in history from the University of San Diego. To do it right, you have to confirm sources and things like that. It took a lot of perseverance.”

By design, Gunderson skipped the February 1964 visit, which included three appearances on “Ed Sullivan,” plus a gig in Washington, D.C., and another at New York’s Carnegie Hall, deciding instead to focus on the official tours. “Bruce Spizer covered that extremely well in his book, ‘The Beatles Are Coming,’” Gunderson says. “I didn’t want to re-create his well-crafted history, so I decided to stick with the three tours.”

Within that structure, Gunderson treated each city like its own chapter. “I decided to basically write the history of the moment they arrived and the moment they left, as well as all the negotiations that went on beforehand. Along with the photos, I wanted to present the memorabilia from each city, so the book has tickets, handbills, contracts, newspaper ads, programs, and anything that was sold at a concert. Each city gets its own comprehensive history.”

A press conference in Boston, September 12, 1964. Photo: Kevin Cole.

The first city profiled in the book, San Francisco, is also the last. Purely by coincidence, San Francisco was the first stop of the first Beatles tour in August of 1964, as well as the place where the tour ended in 1966. “The Beatles were going to kick off their tour in San Diego, California, on August 18,” Gunderson says, “but because of contractual commitments they had in the U.K., they were not able to do it. So the first show ended up being on August 19 in San Francisco at the Cow Palace. When you look at that ’64 tour,” he adds, “it’s really haphazard. They’re north, they’re south, they’re back east. It was not a logical procession across the United States. They were just all over the place.”

In fact, on that first U.S. tour, which included three shows in Canada, one date was even added along the way. “Kansas City was not on the original itinerary,” Gunderson says. “The tour had already been scheduled and booked. September 17 was supposed to be a day off for the Beatles. They were going to play New Orleans on the 16th, and then they had hoped to explore New Orleans a little bit, which, obviously, they couldn’t have done anyway, given all the fans.”

But Charlie Finley, who owned the Kansas City Athletics baseball team, had promised his city a Beatles concert, so he started working on the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, from the moment the tour began in San Francisco. Finley was prepared to pay top dollar to bring The Beatles to Kansas City, which is saying a lot, since they were already the best-paid act in show business.

Gunderson’s book features images of behind-the-scenes memorabilia, such as this press pass issued to disc jockey Ken Douglas of Louisville, Kentucky, radio station WKLO.

“At that time,” says Gunderson, “the big stars were Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, who were each getting between $10,000 and $15,000 a show. When The Beatles came around in 1964, Brian was getting them anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 per show. Finley offered $100,000, and Epstein essentially said, ‘No. They’re having a day off; the tour is booked. Go away.’”

Used to getting his way, Finley was not so easily brushed off. “His ego was huge,” says Gunderson, “and he had the money to spend. So he went to Brian again when The Beatles were in Los Angeles to play the Hollywood Bowl and wrote out a check for $150,000. Reportedly, Brian took it to this private mansion in L.A. where The Beatles were staying and said ‘What do you want me to do with this?’ And they basically said ‘We’ll do anything you want.’ And so The Beatles were booked to play Kansas City on the 17th of September, at just under $5,000 a minute.”

Naturally, Finley wanted the band to play a few extra songs since he had paid them so much to perform. But the set list for that tour, as well as the ones that would follow, was almost sacred. At one point, John Lennon himself rebuffed Finley, saying, “Chuck, we only do 11. That’s it.”

The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein (at left, in sunglasses and white shirt), arrive in Vancouver, B.C., 1964. Photo: Deni Eagland/Vancouver Sun PNG Merlin Archive.

“You’ll notice in many photographs in the book that they have set lists taped to their guitars,” says Gunderson. “Ringo had one on top of his bass drum. The shows would run anywhere from 28 to 34 minutes. They didn’t need to re-tape a new list every night. That was the set list.” In the end, the band relented a bit, adding a Little Richard-inspired medley of “Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!” as the opening number for their Kansas City show.

“My friend Billy had offered me a ticket to the show. It was a done deal.”

All three tours featured supporting acts, so for fans paying the average ticket price of $4.50 in 1964 (Finley’s Kansas City shows were the most expensive, with some seats selling for $8.50), they were getting a lot more than just a half hour of The Beatles. The first tour featured Jackie DeShannon (she had a minor hit at the time with “Needles and Pins”), Bill Black’s Combo (Black had been Elvis Presley’s bass player, but he was too sick to play the tour), the Exciters (“Tell Him”), and the Righteous Brothers, who were stars in their own right but were replaced by Clarence “Frogman” Henry (“Ain’t Got No Home”) early in the tour after the Forest Hills, New York, performances.

“The Beatles had to be transported by helicopter from Manhattan to the Forest Hills shows,” says Gunderson, “so as the helicopter would come in for a landing, the Righteous Brothers were just drowned out.” For the Righteous Brothers, the noise from the audience was just as deafening, and equally insulting. “The whole time they were onstage, fans would be yelling, ‘We want The Beatles! We want The Beatles!’ Finally, they went to Brian and said, ‘Look, we’re done. We’re sick of this. We get paid more on the West Coast where the people know our music.’ So, they were graciously let out of the contract by Brian.”

This 1966 contract for two performances in Memphis, Tennessee, guarantees The Beatles and its supporting acts $50,000.

The 1965 tour featured support from Motown singer Brenda Holloway, the King Curtis Band, Cannibal and the Headhunters, a Brian Epstein-managed group called Sounds Incorporated, and the Discotheque Dancers. In 1966, Beatles fans were treated to performances by a Boston band called The Remains fronted by Barry Tashian, a short-lived group called The Cyrkle (their single was “Red Rubber Ball”), Bobby Hebb, and the Ronettes, who sang “Be My Baby” and their other hits without lead singer Ronnie Bennett, who was forbidden by her jealous future husband, producer Phil Spector, from going on the tour with The Beatles.

If the 1965 tour is remembered for being even more profitable than the first (it was completed in half the time, with many dates featuring two shows in the same venue), the 1966 tour was overshadowed by controversy over comments John Lennon had made many months earlier, in which he was quoted as saying that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” While the context of the remark had been about the perception others had about The Beatles, a teen magazine called Datebook turned it into a boastful brag on the part of Lennon, provoking the burning of Beatles albums and protests at concerts by the Ku Klux Klan.

“The 1966 tour started off like the others,” says Gunderson. “People were like, ‘Hey, they’re coming back. This is great!’ Initially, ticket sales were brisk, and then Datebook came out with Lennon’s remark about Christianity, and that almost entirely derailed the tour.”

A promotion for the band’s 1965 show in Toronto.

Caught in this maelstrom was the venue for what would be their final show in San Francisco. “They were originally going to play the Cow Palace again,” says Gunderson of the site of their 1964 and 1965 concerts. But the Cow Palace only held 16,000 or so people, whereas nearby Candlestick Park could handle more than 40,000. “There’s an image in the book of a telegram to Brian suggesting that they use Candlestick for one show instead of the Cow Palace for two, as they had done in 1965.”

That suggestion was followed, but then the local promoters had to scramble to fill the large ballpark after Lennon’s allegedly controversial comment depressed ticket sales. Which led to a rarity in the history of Beatles tours in North American, a show poster.

“In three years of touring,” says Gunderson, “there were less than six posters. They didn’t need to do much advertising; they’d just put a few ads in the paper and go to local AM station. But there was a little bit more advertising during the ’66 tour,” including that handful of posters, although, says Gunderson, the one designed by Wes Wilson for Candlestick Park is hardly the rarest. “It’s a great poster,” he says, “but the rarest Beatles poster out there is probably for the show in Toronto in ’66. There are only a couple that I know of in existence.”

In 1966, local promoters hired psychedelic rock artist Wes Wilson to design a poster for what would be the last performance by The Beatles.

After the final chords of “Long Tall Sally” had faded away into the cool Candlestick night, The Beatles as a live, touring band were no more. Already burned out and dissatisfied by the fish-bowl existence that came with being on the road, they turned inward, focusing their considerable creative energies on studio albums.

In retrospect, it’s difficult to argue that giving up touring was the wrong decision, since it led directly to classics like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967, “The White Album” in 1968, and “Abbey Road” in 1969. Those recordings, along with “Revolver” in 1966, are routinely ranked among the greatest albums of all time, whose audio quality stands in stark contrast to the dissonant cacophony that awaited North American fans in 1964, ’65, and ’66, when the best one could hope for was a fleeting glimpse of John, Paul, George, and Ringo straining to be heard in an echoing basketball arena or acoustically challenged baseball park.

“There were no monitors back then,” says Gunderson. “Ringo would often say, ‘I used to watch them wiggle their butts on stage, and that’s how I knew where I was in a song.’ Everything was just run through the amplification system of the venue. The sound was horrible.”

Even so, I wish I’d been there.

Police clear the field of fans as The Beatles perform in Candlestick Park, San Francisco, California, August 29, 1966. Photo: Bettmann/CORBIS.

(To order the boxed set, visit somefuntonight.com.)

This post was originally published August 4, 2011.

There are a few things people forget to tell you.

Each year of your twenties is worth three in regular time. The decade moves like dog years except that in the end you suddenly turn 30 as if you didn’t just age a single lifetime. Something happens between the ages of 20 and 25. This is your first go-round as an adult. Your brain shifts and closes and hardens like the soft spot on an infant’s skull. You try harder. You begin to stand up on those baby deer legs and learn how to carry yourself in challenging situations. You eventually grow into a human who is brave enough to wake up before brunch is over, and offices start answering phones with “good afternoon” instead of “good morning.” You’ll never quit being an animal, however.

Around 25 or 26 you will decide to really feel the rain on your skin. It may hurt. By this time, you have already made the big move from your parents’ nest. You’ll look around, survey your life and decide what to carry with you. Who to carry with you. This is the first time you let go of living life by reaction.

Make a list every morning of the smallest expectations. Note each item with a box, not a bullet. Draw an“X” inside each box after completing its corresponding task. This will give you a sense of accomplishment greater than simply striking through. Today you will email the last flagged address in your inbox. Today you will buy handsoap. You will end the night with a single window’s width of tabs open in your browser. You will sleep. It’s OK to add completed items in retrospect, if only to record your performed adulthood.

We are not so mysterious. If you want to get to know someone infinitely better, meet their parents for five minutes. We are attracted to people who were loved in the ways we were loved as children. We are attracted to people who are lacking in ways we understand.

We are all terrified to take our clothing off and equally eager to show our genitals to each other. Do not be so afraid. We tell people we love them when we are unprepared. When we don’t mean it. When we’re drunk. When we’re sober but filled with so many delicious chemicals in our infant skulls standing on our baby deer legs naked in the dark that we may as well be drunk.

Mostly, your relationships will end. You will hold people close to you with the knowledge that everyone is on a timeline. That everyone’s heart will eventually stop beating. Most of the time, though, things will not be this grim. If they were, no one would get laid.

The right people will be your memory bank. The right people will bring out the best in you.

Some people are the wrong people. Do not confuse them with the rare people who are inherently evil or bad. These people are just not for you.

There are the friends you meet for the occasional happy hour, and there are friends with whom you have longstanding Taco Tuesdays. Taco Tuesday means a bottle of wine for each person and peeling back the business-casual mask of the weekday while relaying mortifying tales of performed adulthood to one another. You hit reply all. You cried at your desk. You said “I love you” when you were unprepared or drunk or sober. Any day can be Taco Tuesday. These are the people who fill in your blanks. These are the right people.

We are social but we are not social media. We are social but we cannot survive on content alone. Sometimes being passive consumers of content works against us. If you don’t do it today you’ll put if off and then it will be awkward when you decide you really, really want to email this person. So do it today. Or don’t do it. Or maybe do it tomorrow, but if you don’t do it today you definitely won’t do it tomorrow. Again, make a list. Wash your face.

There is no IRL. This is everything.

Drew Zandonella-Stannard has been writing about the Internet on the Internet since 2002. She lives in Seattle and thinks you're swell.

Photo via Flickr

This post was originally published July 9, 2012.

JANE
MY LITTLE SUNBEAM
WHERE ARE YOU
I NEED YOU BY MY SIDE
I’m taking a walk
be back for dinner
AH YES MY CAGED SPRITE
COMMUNE WITH NATURE AND UPON YOUR RETURN
RELATE TO ME THE VAGRANT GLORIES OF THE  RUINED WOODS
do you really want me to describe my walk to you
MORE THAN ANYTHING YOU POCKET WITCH
it is fairly cloudy out
looks like rain soon
AHHH TO THINK THAT MY LITTLE STARLING JANE
SHOULD RETURN
TO PERCH ON MY BROKEN MALFORMED SHOULDER
SINGING A SONG OF THE GREY AND WRACKING SKIES
MAKES MY HEART SWELL TO BURST
all right

JANE
JANE I BOUGHT YOU A DRESS MADE OF TEN THOUSAND PEARLS AS A BRIDAL PRESENT
where on earth would I wear that
YOU COULD WEAR IT ON THE MOON
that seems impractical
how would i even breathe on the moon?
I WOULD BREATHE FOR YOU MY JANE

JANE WHERE HAVE YOU GONE
I AM BEREFT AND WITHOUT MY JANE I SHALL SINK INTO ROGUERY
i am  with my cousins
WHICH COUSIN
IS IT THE SEXY ONE
Please don’t try to talk to me again
IT IS YOUR SEXY COUSIN
“ST. JOHN”
WHAT KIND OF A NAME IS ST. JOHN
I’m not going to answer that
I KNEW IT
DID YOU LEAVE BECAUSE OF MY ATTIC WIFE
IS THAT WHAT THIS IS ABOUT
yes
absolutely
BECAUSE MY HOUSE IN FRANCE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE AN ATTIC
IF THAT’S WHAT YOU WERE WORRIED ABOUT
IT HAS A CELLAR THOUGH SO YOU KNOW
DON’T CROSS ME
HAHA I’M ONLY JOKING

I hope you’re packed for India already
I’m not going to India with you, St. John
That’s not what these TWO TICKETS TO INDIA say
You know I don’t want to marry you
Why don’t you marry Rosamond instead? 
Take her with you
Marry her?
MARRY HER?
Don’t be ridiculous, I’m attracted to her
That’s disgusting
You are disgusting, Jane

So you’re really not coming then
I’m really not
I would be an amazing husband
you know that?
I know
I taught you Hindi and everything
That’s basically the same as getting engaged
for missionaries
And I really appreciate that
It will be terribly useful in my career as an English governess
See? That. There.
that is exactly the kind of tone I mean
One round of cholera in the tropics would sear that sarcasm right out of you
guess I really missed out
Guess so

Previously: Texts From Scarlett O'Hara.

Mallory Ortberg is a writer in the Bay Area. Her work has also appeared on Slacktory and Ecosalon.

“It is my belief that an acute [NOUN A] of (the) [NOUN B] is the cause of your [BODY PART] [NOUN C]. The only possible treatment is to apply [NOUN D] [LENGTH OF TIME], otherwise avoiding [OBSOLETE/MADE-UP DISEASE] may prove impossible.”

NOUN A

Paucity
Surfeit
Buildup
Drying-up
Heresy
Corruption
Exacerbation
Pulsing
Stirring up
Persistence
Wandering
Somnolence
Agitation
Overabundance
Suppuration
Moistening
Softening
Infrigidation
Inflammation
Lassitude
Rheumatism
Festering
Dislocation
Accumulation
Want
Sympathy
Lack
Vagabondery
Aggregation
Wistfulness
Excess
Migration
Folly
Stagnation

NOUN B

Black bile
Old blood
Choler
Serosal excretions
Green bile
Sexual activity
Menstrual forces
Vital salts
Sperm
Lesser vitamins
Skull
Lungs
Neck
Lymphs
Joint
Minerals
Moral fiber
Womb
Anti-vitamins
Pulsing enzymes
Electrical impulses
Arteries
Leg
Mucous
Spleen
Cool blood

BODY PART

Neck
Earlet
Skin
The Globe of Ares
Nerviles
Membrane
Spinal column
Brain sheath
Flanks

NOUN C

Lugubriousness
Failure
Congealing
Milk leg
Asthenia
Dipsomania
Goiters
Miasmas
Numbness
Demagnetization
Fits
Irritation
Disenfortitude
Giantism
Lumbago
Night fevers
Partial polio
Decrepitude
Ulcerations
Delinquency
Paroxysms
Insalubriousness
Too much salubriousness
Morbidity
Enfeeblement
Rising of the Lights
Morning complaint
Ague
Rebellion
Grotesqueries
Flux

NOUN D

Emetics
Tobacco smoke
Bed rest
Copper
Trepanning
Peppermint tea leaves
Vigorous massage
A trained haruspex
Grape skins
Lots of opium
Vigorous paddling
Corsets
Mormon wafers
Burnett’s Extracts
Nerve and brain ointments
A Roman bath
Hot ashes
A heroin belt
Ice water
Sawdust
Tapeworms
Chloroform
Four drops of mercury
A sound beating
Sulphur
Cocaine
A sweating cure
Electricity

LENGTH OF TIME

At once
Before Whitsuntide
Immediately
After Michaelmas
Posthaste
In a fortnight’s time
Apace
For at least an hour every day

OBSOLETE/MADE-UP DISEASE

Apoplectic rinderpest
Throat rage
Vestibulitis
Pubic reversal
Liver shortage
Nightingale eyes
The bilious chokes
English dropsy
Syphilitic splenitis
Festering mania
Triple rickets
The fisherman’s malady
Weird ankles
Elbow whimsy
Night dropsy
Wandering heart
Yaws
Membranous croup
Quinsy
Gentleman’s abscess
Tingling ligaments
Dracunculiasis
Partial death

Please post your selections in the comments.

Read more Victorian Doctor Mad Libs at The Toast.

The following transcript of a speech given at the Ladies’ Botany Society of Philadelphia in 1874 was believed to have been lost until it was discovered last month in the attic of a house scheduled for demolition. It has been reprinted here in full for the first time, courtesy of the Lady Doctors of Pennsylvania Association.

Honored ladies of the symposium, I thank you for your invitation to speak today. I shall begin my address with no further overtures. The male of the species is perhaps more to be pitied than censured, as it is his physical inability to complete a normal, healthy menstrual cycle that is the root cause of so many of his woeful ailments.

As scientists have discovered, it is the unhealthy retention of aged or “angry” blood (generally more than 2 to 3 months old) that leads to so much of the liver agitation and spinal rage that plague our modern society. The average woman, capable of storing and regularly releasing this blood through the act of menstruation, keeps herself in constant and excellent health, and should be commended for so doing [Pause for applause].

The reason that men — poor things — commit so many murders as a sex is likely due to their failure to slough off this overabundance of old blood through the regular act of menstruation (which not only clears the body of bad blood but also the mind of anti-vitamins, as scientists have so recently and effectively demonstrated). The average male body is so overstuffed with a surfeit of old blood that he may swell as much as six feet tall, which is a height both unnecessary and grotesque for human purposes. This male blood, which is generally unable to be regularly flushed out through the womb, must find some sort of outlet, lest it tumefy and cause the man to burst (a not uncommon sight, I am told, in parts of rural Germany), which I believe is what leads to knife fights and stabbings among men. This makeshift replacement for remedy is exceedingly dangerous, but it does perform the necessary –sometimes life-saving — act of bloodletting.

It has been noted anecdotally, though not yet in a laboratory setting, that many of these men display considerably more rational and intelligent brain-power after these impromptu pseudo-menstruations. Many of you, I know, have told me stories of your own husbands behaving nearly as prudently as yourselves for days after cutting themselves accidentally in the kitchen or coming to blows outside of a public house. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether we as a group can seize upon a more regulated and humane system of replicating the effects of menstruation in our poor masculine counterparts. Imagine how improved our society might be if someday we could teach men to menstruate blood from their own wombs! [Pause for laughter.]

[Unintelligible question from an audience member] It does not seem to me to be altogether necessary to obtain the male opinion on the subject. Do we ask the dog if he prefers a place by the fire before offering him one? Is not their improvement a mutual goal of both of the sexes?

Read more The Causes of Male Hysteria at The Toast.

If you’re sad because you miss someone, but you’re also really hungry:
a) if the person is probably dead: Seeing Daylight
b) if you’re still pretty numb about the whole situation: Alpha Omega
c) if you have a sweet tooth: Jam Eater Blues

If you haven’t had sex in a really long time:
a) if you then have sex: How to Embrace a Swamp Creature
b) if you will probably never have sex again: Autoclave

If you really shouldn’t have had sex with the person you just had sex with: Golden Jackal Song

If the person you’re in love with is a real pill:
a) if you’re feeling pissed about it: Pseudothyrum Song
b) if you don’t really care: Orange Ball of Love
c) if you like Greek mythology: Deianara Crush

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and it’s making you sad:
a) if you’re in the bathroom: Have to Explode
b) if you’re in the living room/bedroom: Game Shows Touch Our Lives

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and it’s making you angry:
a) if you like rhymes: Baboon
b) if you’re in Florida: Alpha Sun Hat
c) if you’re in Florida and also drunk on a bus: See America Right
d) if you’re in a car: Scotch Grove

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and it’s making you passive-aggressive: Spilling Toward Alpha

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and it’s making you horny: Oceanographer’s Choice

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and you feel like you have to honor that: Old College Try, Alpha Rats Nest

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and you don’t give one good goddamn: No Children

If you’re fucking tired of hearing from this person who doesn’t love you anymore. If they’re so fucking sure they don’t love you, why do they keep sending you fucking postcards?: Source Decay

If you have literally no idea how to take care of babies:
a) immediately after birth: San Bernardino
b) some days later: Pink and Blue

If you’re pretty sure your only meaningful interactions these days are with wild animals, and that doesn’t bother you as much as it should: Snow Owl

If you’re in love with someone who is in a relationship with someone else: Standard Bitter Love Song #8

If you and the person you love are both in relationships with other people:
a) if you’re sad about it: So Desperate
b) if you’re happy about it: Alibi
c) if you’re in denial about it: Going to Maine

If you’re in love with someone and it feels absolutely terrible:
a) if you’re unable to talk about it: Alpha in Tauris
b) if you have a child: Poltergeist
c) if you’re in a car: West Country Dream
d) if you like Soviet-era geopolitical similes: International Small Arms Traffic Blues

If you’re in love with someone and miserable for other reasons:
a) if you feel that you will never be entirely comfortable with anyone: Riches and Wonders
b) if you sometimes go for walks by yourself late at night: Moon over Goldsboro

If you’re in love with someone and it feels OK, but you’re pretty sure it’s going to get worse from here:
a) if you’re still trying to have a good time: First Few Desperate Hours
b) if you’re pre-emptively having a very bad time: Letter from a Motel
c) if you like ominous imagery: Tallahassee
d) if you like references to Aristotelian poetics and you’re in a car: The Recognition Scene

If you’re in love with someone and the shit is juuuuust about to hit the fan:
a) if you’re impatient for it to do so: Alphonse Mambo
b) if the other person doesn’t know yet: It’s All Here in Brownsville
c) if the other person doesn’t know yet and also you’re in the shower: Shower
d) if the other person knew first and you wish they would just come out with it already: New Britain
e) if you’re in a car: Horseradish Road

If you’re in love with someone and it feels great, but that’s mostly because you’re a teenager and you don’t have a lot else to feel good about:
a) if your partner is slightly exploitative: Dinu Lipatti’s Bones
b) if your partner is slightly criminal-minded: Attention All Pickpockets
c) if your home life is very bad: Broom People
d) if there are UFOs: Tulsa Imperative
e) if you’re high on pills and you’re in a car: Dilaudid

If you’re in love with someone and it’s actually making you happy:
a) if you’re in a pretty quiet mood and it’s raining: There Will Be No Divorce
b) if you’ve got a motorcycle: Jenny
c) if you romanticize the Old World: Flight 717: Going to Denmark
d) if you romanticize the New World: Going to Mexico
e) if you’re in a car and the relationship is going to last: Twin Human Highway Flares
f) if you’re in a car and it isn’t: Alpha Incipiens

If you’re not really in love anymore, at least not in a way that an impartial observer would recognize
a) if your job gives you lots of vacation time: The Mess Inside
b) if you spend all your money on ephemeral goods: Fault Lines
c) if you blame your partner for the whole situation: Standard Bitter Love Song #4
d) if your partner smokes: Orange Ball of Hate

If you’re just straight-up in a car:
a) if it’s hot with heat: The Car Song
b) if it’s hot with hatred: Family Happiness
c) if you’re in New York: Going to Port Washington

If you and the person you’re in love with are separated by a large quantity of land/water:
a) if they’re farther north than you: New Star Song
b) if they’re farther south than you: Noctifer Birmingham
c) if you’re sad about it: Raja Vocative
d) if you’re sad about it and interested in Aztec mythology: Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums
e) if you’re resigned to it: Dutch Orchestra Blues
f) if you’re resigned to it and don’t like crows: Distant Stations
g) if you’re fabulously, cartoonishly lonely: Any Available Surface

If you and the person you’re in love with are separated, period:
a) if it just happened: Woke Up New
b) if it happened an embarrassingly long time ago: Half Dead
c) if it happened in a parking lot: Somebody Else’s Parking Lot in Sebastopol
d) if you’re very bitter about it: Standard Bitter Love Song #1
e) if you’re very bitter about it and have a gun: Black Molly
f) if your sadness feels like such a permanent and physical presence that you’re thinking maybe you should start introducing it at parties, like, “Hi, I’m John, this is my sadness, nice to meet you”: Waving at You
g) if they owe you an improbably large sum of money: Alpha Desperation March

If your actual relationship status is unclear, but you think everything might eventually be OK:
a) if this is because you are aware of the transience of both pain and happiness: We Were Patriots
b) if it’s because you’ve just had a tulip-related moment of catharsis: Minnesota
c) if there are dogs nearby: Weekend in Western Illinois

Read more Which Mountain Goats Song Should You Be Listening To? at The Toast.

Remember the 300 $andwiches Lady? You know, the food blogger who says her boyfriend told her that once she made him 300 $andwiches, he'd buy her an engagement ring in what of course was not a shamelessly craven gimmick to get a book deal? Well: she's only 100 $andwiches away. And her boyfriend wants advice on how to propose. That's enough, Sandwich family. That's enough.

Read more...

Dear family, friends, and plus ones:

On our one-year wedding anniversary (what what!), Eric and I would like to officially thank you for helping make my special day so special. There were wayyyy too many of you to send individual cards so I thought this group email was perfect! It’s also an opportunity to share how all of your gifts have impacted our married life, and possibly remind some of you that there are still a few items available on our registries at Neiman-Marcus, Bloomingdales, Crate and Barrel, Tiffany’s, and the British Museum. Thanks so much!!!

When Eric and I got married, it changed everything. We had been living together for three blissful years in our one-bedroom ninth-floor walk-up. Everything we needed we got from Target or as hand-me-downs from friends, and we were happy eating cereal for dinner. Then he finally put a ring on it! Our wedding was magical. After dancing the night away in the banquet space behind Villa Maria’s, I turned to him and said, “The only thing that could make this day more perfect is things.” Now that we’re married, I literally can’t imagine a day when I don’t touch silver.

I didn’t believe in it until it happened to me, but there’s just this mystical transformation when you “get hitched.” The second I was somebody’s wife, living a high-quality lifestyle just became really important to me, like when I got engaged and getting thin became really important to me. Every single day I think about using all the professional-level cooking equipment I made you buy me. Our kitchen would not be complete without the $379.95 Le Creuset French Oven in Flame that Eric’s mom gave us (what up mother-in-law!), and the $500 KitchenAid Mixer in Raspberry from Eric’s stepmom (what up stepmother-in-law!) is such a great accent piece on our counter.

I don’t expect my unmarried friends to understand this, but since Eric and I have been husband and wife, one of our favorite pastimes is hosting elaborate dinner parties. (Lol at my mother saying the crystal was “a bit much,” also what up Eric’s mother-in-law!) I’m so happy to say that the $200 set of Waterford Crystal “Lismore” Martini Glasses looks awesome on our shelves, thank you SO much Eric’s cousin! And those Baccarat “Mille Nuit” Wine Glasses come in SO handy. I want all of you who spent $155 for each glass to know that they’re worth every penny. We have only broken three!

It’s crazy to think that I used to squeeze the plastic bag from a box of Franzia to get the last drops into my face. Marriage has actually turned me into somewhat of a sommelier! That’s right: I know what a chardonnay is now. (It’s wine.) Thank goodness for that $289.95 Dual Zone Thermoelectric Wine Cooler from Eric’s brother Tom and his partner Steve, who were so generous even though they can’t get married in their state (which is like so awkward and, ugh, c’mon government!). I literally don’t know what we would do without having 27 bottles of wine at all times, regulated at their optimal temperatures via digital climate control. Equally necessary was my cousin Jessica’s $80 Kate Spade Top Hat Ice Bucket, which is exactly what it sounds like. And can you believe the price? Jessica, you bargain-hunter!

My home is my castle, and as we all know, high thread count is crucial to a castle. Eric and I could not be more pleased with the beautiful $375 Queen-Sized Duvet from the Calvin Klein Sapling Collection that his Aunt gifted. I wish we could afford the whole set! (Hint, hint. Haha JK!) Once you “take the plunge,” your home really becomes your sanctuary. I wish I could think of a way to explain it to my single friends and cousin Sarah, but it’s so hard to remember life before I was a “Mrs.!” But Sarah (what up Sarah!) I know you’ve been hinting, so let me try: You know how, when you go home at night, there’s nobody there and your apartment is just kind of empty of love and you eat in front of the TV off of Ikea plates? Marriage is basically the opposite of that But don’t worry Sarah, we are making great use of the French Kitchen Marble Cheese Dome, which seems like such a steal at $59.95!

What is a cheese dome? If you have to ask, you’ll never get married.

It’s the little things that make all of the difference. Like the $498 Argentinian Candy Jar Mandy got us, the perfect ethnic detail for our kitchen. I’m too scared to open Millers with Aunt Maddy’s $250 Tiffany Bottle-Opener, but it looks really impressive on the counter. Furthermore, Julie’s $60 Hand-Braided Apple Baskets have been as essential to my post-engagement life as my bridal hashtag. Even though I spent my pre-engaged weekends drinking all day, now that I’m married, we apple-pick, as is required.

I’ve always been the kind of girl who’s a little ahead of the curve. That’s why I favored a more traditional registry experience: old is the new new! And let’s be honest, experiential registries are tacky, and you can’t just ask for money! (No offense Dana and Brian lol! Your wedding was actually really cute.) I’m so grateful that everyone came out and supported my bridal shower, lingerie shower, and shower shower (still using Kaitlyn’s amazeballs monogrammed soaps!), because I definitely came out for all of your wedding events, and probably totally will for those of you who have yet to “settle.”

And I just have to say, for the record: Why should I feel guilty for wanting to get (and totally getting!) my money’s worth? I’ve spent ten grand going to weddings in the past five years. Enough is enough! It was totally my turn to upgrade my kitchen stuff, and it was your turn to cough up the cash. Or not! I probably wouldn’t have cheaped out on a $25 beer stein if my really close friend had already spent half a paycheck flying out to my weird destination wedding in Ireland. I definitely at least would have tried to go in on something nice with one of our loaded friends, like Mandy. Erin, it’s fine, but you’re dead to me.

So thank you guys so much again for your love and support. Eric and I definitely couldn’t have done it without you!!!!!!!! Oh, and if you didn’t include a receipt with your gift, could you please send that in case we want to exchange it? Thanks!!!!!!

Love love love,

Mrs. Erika Barnes <3

P.S. If anyone is still waiting to make a grand gesture of support, this would be such a cute conversation piece for our bathroom!