I saw you mention this in yesterday's roundup, and I am still gobsmacked. Your sister might be the heroine of an obscure fairytale in which the wise maiden cleverly escaped the ogre's lair and the ogre was so overcome with crippling insecurity that he began devouring ever-spicier food and ever-manlier books until he went up in flames, because, of course, spontaneous combustion is preferable to the words of a woman.

WHAT. IN THE. GOOD GOD. Let me go never sleep again.

If someone is already on this, sorry, but I need the Toast collective to weigh in on the Man Book Club. There are so many things going on here I'm not sure where to start. (By "weigh in," I do mean, mock wildly until mysterious bouts of insecurity and ennui become sex-linked hereditary traits in their great-great-great-grandsons.)

Sorry for this little kernel of bitterness in the face of joyful Ithaca appearances, but it's kind of related news: I bought tickets a couple weeks ago to Not Your Mother's Feminism at Brooklyn Historical Society tonight based on the fact that they were promoting Mallory as part of the panel. (Maybe other reasons, but mostly because I was secretly hoping for a partial spontaneous recitation of GRRM's Redwall in that beautiful old building . . . ) Cut to this morning: they update ticket-buyers about a new person joining the panel and I noticed Mallory is no longer listed. Twitter stalking revealed that they *had* invited Mallory but never actually booked travel/made arrangements, which they had to have known by the time I purchased the ticket in late March. I like BHS, their events, their mission, etc., but this felt like a knowing bait-and-switch in a really unpleasant way.

The "Brooklyn" phenomenon was deftly chronicled by Adelle Waldman, but such is the reach and might of the Jonathan Wheel that she could not invoke the name directly. In an act of fairy tale cleverness, she summoned [--]Nathan(iel), or Nate, into the world using a kernel of the original. Even the foremost of the Brooklyn Jonathans (Franzen, He Who Throws Change) had to gnash his teeth and acknowledge that it was "a more deeply clever book than you might think as you first start reading it.” This is all sensible, as it is prophesied that an Adelle will lead us in the breaking of the Jonathan Wheel.

The windows in this office weren't properly insulated, so keeping them open was sometimes a choice between tolerating any smells that were percolating and having nearby construction dust wafting in. The size of the staff had very quickly outstripped the actual available space, but the CEO was cheap, and we ended up with a rabbit warren situation and a rapidly diminishing recycling/mail area where people would pile various paper junk and broken-down boxes. This pile would sometimes go weeks without being cleared out, and had to reach some sort of comical critical status to be addressed (usually by an assistant/intern.) So come one Cleanup Day, the poor designated temporary janitor comes back from his duty totally ashen-faced. It turned out nobody had gotten to the pile in awhile, nobody, that is, except for some unfortunate mice who had been crushed beneath the mailing detritus. They'd spent some time marinating there and being mashed into the hadn't-been-replaced-since-the-'70s carpet. The guy initially thought they were still alive and maybe were just stuck on a dislodged sticky trap, but no, it was just a really lively mass of maggots writhing around. And this wasn't some back staircase landing. It was an openish area in the *middle of the office* that everyone had been walking past multiple times a day, every day, blissfully ignorant of the horror buried beneath. At least there wasn't much of a smell?

Adding a disgusting office vermin story. I'm following suit with the thoughtful person above and putting the (mice-and-maggot-ridden) details in a reply.