Naomi Watts in King Kong

Say what you like (actually, please don’t; it’s just an expression) but I’m absolutely tickled by the picture that Eric Shansby drew as an illustration for the column Gene Weingarten and I did for last Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine.

As you might have read in my previous post, the management at the paper (I imagine them as the group which, in academic life, would comprise the deans, vice presidents, and provosts of our world) were scared that Shansby’s illustration might be offensive to some readers.

Since nobody contacted me directly, I’m imagining I was not one of the people they thought might be offended.

And I wasn’t. So there.

The fact that I am wildly smiling as an ape-like creature carries me off into the sunset and away from Weingarten, who is pictured as bereft and holding sadly wilted — not to say withered — flowers, is just dandy...

Would you help me out here, folks?

Would you read the following and then let me know what you think about whether the editors of The Washington Post were right in believing they needed to offer a caveat, a pre-emptive apology, for the column Gene Weingarten and I did together and/or for the illustration accompanying it?

The following Editor’s Note appeared on the Corrections page in Sunday’s Washington Post.

“The headline, illustration and text of ‘Below the Beltway’,’ a column in The Washington Post Magazine today, may cause offense to readers. The magazine was printed before a widely publicized incident last week in which a chimpanzee attacked and badly mauled a woman in Stamford, Conn. In addition, the image and text inadvertently may conjure racial stereotypes that The Post does not countenance. We regret the lapse.”

And here’s a link to the article itself:

In my next...

I’ll confess I’ll lie I’ll scream I’ll get married I’ll set a fire I’ll break something I’ll break in I’ll break out I’ll ignore it I’ll declare it I’ll bury it I’ll dig it up I’ll forgive I’ll forget I’ll testify I’ll explain I’ll withhold I’ll pay for it I’ll laugh I’ll cry I’ll clean up I’ll wreck it I’ll ruin it I’ll cook it I’ll disguise it I’ll drug it I’ll shun it I’ll expose it I’ll hide it I’ll dominate it I’ll rule over it I’ll inhibit it I’ll free it I’ll control it I’ll make it feel guilty I’ll exhaust it I’ll fear it I’ll disturb it I’ll arouse it I’ll eliminate it I’ll excite it I’ll put it to sleep I’ll calm it I’ll tease it I’ll irritate it I’ll overwhelm it I’ll depend on it I’ll make it feel guilty I’ll let it control me I’ll befriend it I’ll adopt it I’ll chase it I’ll soothe it I’ll inspire it I’ll feed it I’ll listen to it I’ll help it I’ll save it I’ll study...

Right before I clicked the red “Publish” button on the Brainstorm website before posting the previous piece, I Googled the phrase “why men can’t handle money” to see what other articles would come up under that heading. I’m wary of throwing a piece of writing into the virtual pot that looks exactly like 17,478 other pieces floating around, and so I like to check. I figured there would be a lot of material on the subject, given the current sense of not-so-free-floating-panic, and so I was prepared to change my heading before clicking that familiar button.

Imagine my surprise and childish sense of secret-heart delight when the search itself seemed to prove my point even as it appeared to anticipate the arguments that others would make against it.

Some of the top references that came up were these:

AskMen.com – Can Women Handle Money? Let’s face it: chicks can’t handle money Help! My...

“Guys trade around, apparently looking over their shoulders for any fresh, tantalizing, practically nubile investment possibility.”

A study came out of the UC Davis Graduate School of Management in 2001 — stay with me here — loaded up with scientific collateral as well as convincing simplicity, announcing what a few of us already regard as truths so self-evident they’d be up there with the pursuit of happiness and the right to upgrade if you have earned enough miles: Men and women are different, and one way this difference manifests itself is through diverging styles, strategies, and ideologies of investment.

I think we should take another look at it.

Here’s my reductive but not, I hope, misrepresentative version of the results presented in Terrance Odean and Brad Barber’s “Boys will be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment”: their evidence shows that...

I don’t alphabetize my books.

Does this shock you?

I’ve discovered that people either look at me in disbelief and horror, as if I just said “I eat endangered song birds for lunch” or else they shrug and say “So? Neither do I.”

Members of the Shrug group then go on to discuss their own patterns of book keeping: volumes are in piles around their bed and their desk, grouped by urgency (“I have the mystery I’m reading next to my pillow, the manuscript I’m reviewing on my desk, the collection of quotations next to the toilet, the book I’m teaching in my briefcase”) or by size (“Art books on the bottom shelf because they’re so heavy, paperbacks on the very top”) or by color (“I do them in a spectrum because my walls are white, the floor is oak, the furniture is black, the window treatments are taupe, and therefore the spines of our books provide necessary color in the room”)....

The ghost still liked men. They alone understood her.

The handsomest man at this party, she noticed, was in a lovely dark jacket and a crisp white shirt. A neatly trimmed beard showed early graying, but his hair was dark and curly, worn so it brushed the top of his collar. He stood with his arms folded and leaned easily against the bookcase in the library. His handsome face, framed by the light, moved in a way that she’d always liked: His dark eyes, his high cheekbones, his red mouth all seemed enlivened by the closeness of the low-ceilinged room. He was having an animated conversation with the master of the house. They were good friends.

Although the ghost had seen this guest before, she’d never noticed him in this way.

She was glad that no one could see her face when the wife strode into the library. How could she not smirk outright at this woman’s frowziness? The wife’s...

The ghost stood at the top of the stairs. She was a tall ghost, with long tawny hair swirling on top of her head, with some strands slipping down to her very pale, very bare, very lovely shoulders.

Alive, she used to worry constantly about how she appeared to other people. Now it was no longer the old question her rivals asked — “What do men see in her?” — but a far more fundamental question of whether anyone saw anything of her at all.

Yet no one could deny that she had tremendous presence.

It was as if she carried with her a sense of expectation the way she once wore scent; those within reach experienced the indefinable nearness of her as part of their own sensibility. She did not possess them; they sought her. Several people from the party below looked towards her without knowing what caught their attention.

The dress she had worn simply forever. The only part of...

John Updike (AP photo by Caleb Jones)

So Updike is gone, and his death is shocking for some of us who didn’t think he was old enough to die.

He was only 76, and even though it feels a little strange to put “only” in front of 76, that’s how it hits me.

But as Updike’s work reminds us, there’s no such thing as old enough to die. Just think of the stark portrait of a life’s final hours he gave us in “Dog’s Death,” a poem that still has the power to make me cry as I glance, almost unwillingly, as I post it here:

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car. Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction. The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver. As we teased her with play, blood was...