The following, once embraced, will make life better:

Staying in nice hotels. I suggest that you always stay at the best hotel possible, even if that means selling your body to the night. Or worse, clipping coupons. Tawdry hotel rooms are a leading cause of depression among women over 30.

Have you ever stayed in one of those miserable rooms where cheap sheets make you itch? Where the scent of wet wool, old feet, and cheap soap mingle, shall we say, infelicitously? Where your soul shrivels at the very idea of bathing, or sleeping, or even touching the remote to turn on the television? Where, by the end of your stay, you are practically squatting in the corner like an extra from >i?The Snake Pit?

Don’t stay in such places. Find a hotel that supplies you with cute accessories that you take home as if they were tiny gifts left just for you, a plush terry robe (which you do not take...

Passed along to me by a colleague in Kyoto, a lovely, charming, and politically incorrect overview on how the citizens of various countries respond to humor (originally published in “Look Japan,” January 1988):

“One often-told joke, of which the Japanese are very fond, goes as follows:

— When a Frenchman hears a joke, he laughs when the joke is only halfway through.

— When an Englishmen hears a joke, he waits until it is finished and then laughs.

— When a German hears a joke, he philosophizes over it all night and then laughs the next morning.

— When a Japanese hears a joke, he only just smiles, because he doesn’t understand it.

— When an American hears a joke, he smiles, and then tells you that’s an old joke and, besides, you didn’t tell it right.”

From: UCSD

To: Everybody who applied but didn’t actually get in even though you got a letter saying you were admitted.

Happy early April Fool’s!

We were only kidding when we said you got in.

We know that especially for you kids who thought it was a great reach, who couldn’t believe that you got lucky, this note is not really a surprise.

Who did you think you were kidding anyway?

We looked at your Facebook pages, we saw what people wrote on your walls.

Not only that, we glanced at your applications.

They were flimsy, ridiculous, pathetic, poorly written, incorrectly formatted, non-spell-checked, psychologically deviant, and intellectually twisted.

We know that half of you downloaded your personal essays directly from the Internet and didn’t even pony up the 15 bucks it would have taken to have some poor Ph.D. student in Botswana write one for you.

We know...

She’s just finished her liberal arts degree and although she’s worked part-time since she was sixteen, she’s now looking for full-time work in New York. Her guy is in the city; they would like to be together.

Fair enough.

She e-mails me and asks for advice — after all, I had her weekly advice when she was my student last year. She’s young, smart, and hip but scared: Who would want to hire her? What can she offer?

Another friend is also looking for work. Senior by 22 years to the former student I’ve just mentioned, she is nevertheless as nervous and feels, perhaps, even more unprepared. After being at home with her kids for 14 years, she’s decided it’s time to get a renewed sense of accomplishment outside her family. And she needs the dough. She’s desperate for the financial independence. She wants and needs a job.

Both asked advice about facing an interview.

I know they’ll...

The other day a friend asked if I would trade my ability to recall instantly the words to any popular song I have heard on the radio — a small talent, but one that makes me inordinantly proud — for the chance to be tall and blonde.

She thought it would take me time to decide. She was wrong.

“You bet I would. In a heartbeat,” was my answer.

We kept going. And that’s how I realized, for example, that were I were asked to choose between the extinction of a certain breed of biting ant and the right to use Raid to keep bugs of any stripe out of my bedroom, you know I would choose Raid.

Yes, I KNOW better. I know that the ecosystem is an intricate web of delicate balances beyond the perception of selfish, indifferent, moron Philistines such as myself.

However, however, however — ants in the bedroom?

Nope.

Given the chance, you know I am going to buy lots of those little plastic ...

As George Eliot pointed out, with her signature understatement, “a difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”

Here’s my story about the first time I remember, consciously, the joke-not-a-joke business being played out in my professional life. I’d certainly encountered enough of it in other areas, but somehow I’d convinced myself that academics, scholars, and literary types wouldn’t do this sort of thing.

I was very young.

On the first day of my first MLA — I was just starting my Ph.D. — I encountered an academic so well known that non-grad-school, normal people would have recognized him from his appearance on various upscale television programs and from his picture in newspapers and magazines. He and I were in the elevator — and it was one of those mysteriously long MLA elevator rides.

At that point, I was still wearing my scarf from New Hall,...

What is the best way to respond to sexual harassment disguised as humor?

Let me admit that I collect great responses to bullying remarks the way some women clip coupons. These rejoinders are useful, free, and they can help you save what counts: time, energy and sanity. My current favorites may be apocryphal but they are nonetheless instructive for that. The way that fables are invented and yet contain truth, so do these. So that while it’s true that we can’t always come up with the perfect answer, at least we should set up as possible heroines those women who have.

For example, after Liz Carpenter worked for the Johnson administration she wrote a book about her experiences working at the White House. The book was out for a while, did pretty well. One evening she met Arthur Schlesinger at a cocktail party. He came over to her and smiled and said “Like your book Liz. Who wrote...

In the most recent issue of The Common Review, I am proud to be a “Bookend” — meaning that I was honored by this publication of the Great Books Foundation in being permitted to write their humorous end-of-magazine piece. I wrote about the idea of “Post-Post-Feminism” and whether that can exist. I’d be grateful if you’d take a look at the whole piece, but what I’d particularly like is response to the list I compiled comparing the various “waves” of feminists to one another, as follows:

Fears Being Called:

Performer Embodying The Phase:

Prefers:

Considers herself a little wild if...

From a recent piece on Reuters.com, I learned that “Most Britons have lied about the books they read.”

According to the study, which surveyed 1,342 members of the public on behalf of the organizers of World Book Day, people lie like rugs when they’re trying to impress others with their erudition.

Reuters tells us that “those who lied have claimed to have read:

1. 1984 – George Orwell (42 percent)

2. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (31)

3. Ulysses – James Joyce (25)

4. The Bible (24)

5. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (16)

6. A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking (15)

7. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (14)”

And naturally the list continues. I didn’t read all of it, even though I’m pretending I did.

Naturally, too, the Reuters story reminded me of the quintessential academic game which is described, developed or — at the very least — dubbed, “Humiliation” by...

It is astonishing how young a woman may be and yet be thought of as old, and how old a man may be and yet be thought of as young.

I’ve been considering it. A lot.

This started after I had my gallbladder removed, although I don’t think that everyone necessarily experiences this as a side effect.

When I was recuperating (already I’m introducing a wonderfully youthful phrase, right?), I caught the end of one of the world’s best movies, Sunset Boulevard.

Enthralled, I watched it for the 20th time, but — and this is the crucial factor — for the first time in about 10 years.

Let me ask you: Without checking — no Googling now, no going to IMDB — how old would you say Norma Desmond is?

C’mon, be honest? When she’s clutching her neck, gritting her teeth, having lost her mind over her younger lover, saying in her delirium, “I’m ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille,”

How old do you...