Category: Uncategorized

don’t let the bedbugs bite

One more entry in the People Named Josh Benton Who Are Not Me Dept.:

After waking up one night in sheets teeming with tiny bugs, Josh Benton couldn’t sleep for months and kept a flashlight and can of Raid with him in bed.

“We were afraid to even tell people about it at first,” Benton said of the bedbugs in his home. “It feels like maybe some way your living is encouraging this, that you’re living in a bad neighborhood or have a dirty apartment.”

Absent from the U.S. for so long that some thought they were a myth, bedbugs are back. Entomologists and pest control professionals are reporting a dramatic increase in infestations throughout the country, and no one knows exactly why.

Although, you know, I have been having trouble sleeping lately.
If you’re among the 34,927 people who’ve emailed me that story today, yes, I’ve seen it.

tough taks story

Had a strange story-like substance on the front page today:

How’s your geometry? Here’s a test: What equation represents the area of the shaded rectangle located inside this cube? Almost six out of 10 Texas high school students missed that question on the TAKS test this spring. Inside are the eight toughest questions on the toughest TAKS test. Can you outsmart an average 17-year-old?

Now with an interactive test!

bill buford

Great piece in The Observer on Bill Buford, one of my favorite writers. His book Among The Thugs is one of my favorite pieces of ’90s nonfiction, and his refounding of Granta built a home for some of the best ’80s writers. Buford went on to be the fiction editor of The New Yorker, and his new book is about what pulled him away from that gig.
The author of the Observer piece is Tim Adams, a former Buford deputy at Granta. He wrote one of the better essays in the recent The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, which featured some promising big-name writers (Binyavanga Wainaina, Franklin Foer, James Surowiecki, Jorge Castaneda, Nick Hornby, the obligatory Dave Eggers) but ended up being a bit disappointing. (And that’s beyond the grating condescension of the title.)

john hodgman, demetri martin, and me

It’s very funny to me that Microsoft has apparently hired Demetri Martin to be part of an upcoming marketing campaign. You see, the hiring of Demetri (a correspondent for The Daily Show) follows Apple’s hiring of John Hodgman to represent Windows in their recent “I’m a Mac,” “I’m a PC” commercials. And John Hodgman is, of course, himself a Daily Show correspondent.
But the amusing part to me is that I went to college with both John and Demetri. Not just the same university (Yale) — but the same undergraduate residential college (Calhoun College). Calhoun has, in any given year, about 400 students. It’s strange to think that both John and Demetri — independently selected by rival corporations to represent the same operating system after serving as non-traditional correspondents on the same late-night satirical news program — probably lived down the hall from one another.
(For the record, John was a senior when I was a freshman; Demetri was a junior. I have no memory of John, but I sort of knew Demetri — we were both history majors, so we took some classes together. Still, we’re talking maybe one or two conversations, tops.)
Unsupportable Claim Of The Day: The Daily Show, through its prominent use of Yale grads, is an overt attempt by the university to counterbalance the dominant role that Harvard graduates have traditionally had on televised comedy.
Demetri on Yale: “Take the alumni magazine, if you look in the back and see the class notes of everyone who’s still alive, it’s poetic — you can really see the trajectory of everyone’s lives. ‘So and so is just starting an international relations program at Georgetown,’ that kind of thing. When you’re first out, you’re trying to find yourself, then a few years later, everyone’s announcing their marriages and kids, and then you go back to class of ’60 or something and some guy just bought the St. Louis Cardinals. When you move back even farther, then it’s just about who’s alive and I guess a little before that, grandchildren, family.”
John on Yale: “I for one was certainly intimidated, as I had attended an experimental ‘alternative’ high school program which had many good points, but focused less on the classics of English and American Literature and more on reading One Hundred Years of Solitude as many times as possible. You would think this would at least give me a grounding in what the word ‘chthonic’ meant. But in truth, the first time one of my well-trained classmates spoke that word my brain exploded in fear. Luckily, I knew if I made it, Geo. HW Bush would be handing me 100 bars of gold at graduation with ‘Skull and Bones’ stamped on them, so I took some comfort in knowing I would always be provided for.”