"Last August, a woman in Chicago opened her Too Good to Go bag and found seven pounds of smashed cake..."

"... (which she and her friend, the friend confessed, gobbled down). Someone who goes by Cassie Danger on Reddit reported receiving a 'corn sandwich' from a Choc O Pain in the Hoboken/Jersey City area, that is, a roll containing a handful of canned corn niblets topped with a couple of lettuce leaves."

Writes Patricia Marx in "Spoiler Alert: Leftovers for Dinner/How to host a dinner party for nine using a pre-trash haul from Too Good to Go and other food-waste apps. Carb-averse guests, beware" (The New Yorker).

Marx's 9 guests arrived and dumped out the "surprise bags" they'd ordered from the app Too Good to Go (which packages food left over from 6,987 NYC stores and restaurants):

"In 1942, Vogue quoted a male soldier saying of his female counterparts, 'To look unattractive these days is downright 'morale-breaking and should be considered treason.'"

"The next year, that magazine carried an ad naming women in uniform the 'Best Dressed Women in the World Today.' The government asked Elizabeth Arden to concoct a lipstick to match the red piping on women’s Marine Corps uniforms. Women marines were issued this Montezuma Red lipstick and matching nail polish in their official military kits. (It remained mandatory for thirty more years.) A Tangee cosmetics ad from the era reasoned, 'No lipstick—ours or anyone else’s—will win the war. But it symbolizes one of the reasons we are fighting . . . the precious right of women to be feminine and lovely, under any circumstances.'"

 
Writes Patricia Marx, in "Is the Army’s New Tactical Bra Ready for Deployment? It’s fire-resistant but not bulletproof, and was developed with help from eighteen thousand female soldiers" (The New Yorker).

"[T]he most preposterously priced mattress, a king-size Grande Vivius, costs $539,000...."

"When Drake bought one, in 2020, it was merely $400,000. For non-Grammy winners, there’s a waiting list. Handcrafted by a team of artisans in Sweden, each mattress takes up to six hundred hours to assemble and stitch and is wrapped in checked cotton ticking....  Gwyneth Paltrow partnered with Avocado on the Goop x Avocado mattress... which starts at $24,000 and is available on demand.... While I waited for the couple chilling out on the Eco Organic model to move on, I asked a sales associate named Desi (long hair, leggings) if customers ever fall asleep. 'All the time,' she said. 'The longest was four and a half hours. He was so embarrassed that he bought the mattress.'... The Casper Nova Hybrid ($2,295) is awfully cozy, and I also like the Casper Original, both the all-foam ($1,295) and the hybrid foam with springs ($1,695). Staring at the ceiling in Bloomingdale’s, listening to the Four Seasons sing 'Oh, what a night' over the sound system, I wanted to answer 'Both' to the salesperson’s question: Which is more comfortable? Some of this confusion is deliberate....  Amid all the shadiness and hyped marketing, how to choose?"

 
From "How to Buy a New Mattress Without a Ph.D. in Chemistry/The disrupter economy has set its sights on your bedroom, offering gel capsules, ice fabric, green-tea memory foam, and copper-infused toppers. Will they help you get a better night’s sleep?" by Patricia Marx (The New Yorker).

"My mother does not like to admit that anything is ever sad or wrong, so if my father would say something like, 'During the Depression …' She’d say...'"

"'Oh, Dick, there was no Depression.' She was like a Depression-denier"/"My mother was more like a personal depression-denier. Her whole thing was if you were sad, she would say, 'Stop staring at your navel.' When I grew up, I didn’t know what other people talked to each other about, because there were so many things we didn’t talk about"/"My mother was very can-do. She told me, 'Nobody needs more than four hours of sleep.' I hate sleeping. Guilt gets me up"/"I like to sleep because I’m interested in dreaming, but it’s more like profound laziness or momentum. Once I’m awake, going to sleep just seems so annoying, and once I’m sleeping, waking up seems so annoying."

From "Roz Chast and Patricia Marx Mine the Mother Lode/The longtime friends on their new book, the pleasures — and perils — of childhood, and the remarkable success of their indie uke band" (NYT).

I've liked both of them for a long time. It's a funny interview. Their new book is "Why Don't You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?: A Mother's Suggestions" — and I just pre-ordered it.

I just happened to run into that, but with 3 in a row on the topic of motherhood, this gets my "blog has a theme today" tag. First time since last November!

"The three-pound wrinkly glop of glopoplasm in your skull contains about a hundred billion neurons, one for every human being who ever be’d."

"Each neuron can hook up with up to ten thousand others (polygamy-style, not serially monogamously). Hence there are at least one hundred trillion neural connections in your brain, which is more than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy, but who’s counting."

I'm amused by the writing style of Patricia Marx, whose new book "Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties" is the main thing I was reading in my Kindle yesterday.

"In recent years, a new Korean word, sung-gui, began to surface online. It means 'plastic-surgery monster.'"

It's "a person who has had so much cosmetic alteration that he or she 'looks unnatural and arouses repulsion,'" writes Patricia Marx in an excellent New Yorker article about the extreme popularity of plastic surgery in South Korea. Supposedly, "a third of all plastic-surgery patients were dissatisfied with the results," and there was a reality TV show called "Back to My Face":

I met with Siwon Paek, the producer of the show’s pilot. In the pilot, contestants who had had at least ten surgeries compete to win a final operation that promises to undo all the previous reconstructions. Paek emphasized that the aim is to help plastic-surgery addicts come to terms psychologically with their appearance. Those with lower incomes, she said, tend to be the most compulsive about plastic surgery. “They feel they have no other way to prove themselves to people and lift themselves socially and economically,” she said. Although the “Back to My Face” pilot was popular, Paek said that she will produce no more episodes. “I didn’t have the strength to continue,” she told me. The responsibility of changing people’s lives weighed too heavily on her, she said, and finding contestants was hard. “For one month, I stood outside a dance club,” she told me. “I solicited two hundred people. Most didn’t want to go back to the way they looked before.”

So the lady getting on the plane with you seems to be carrying a duffel bag, "But it turns out it wasn't a duffel bag."

"We could smell it and it was a pig on a leash. She tethered it to the arm rest next to me and started to deal with her stuff, but the pig was walking back and forth. I was terrified, because I was thinking I'm gonna be on the plane with the pig."

Said the professor, who wasn't pleased that this lady sat down next to him.

This doesn't surprise me at all, because I've read "Pets Allowed/Why are so many animals now in places where they shouldn’t be?" It's got a whole section where the author — Patricia Marx — tested the phenomenon of emotional-support animals by taking a pig on a plane:

We settled into seats 16A and 16B...  Daphne arranged herself on my lap... [A] flight attendant passed Row 16. “Aren’t you adorable!” she said....

[On the return flight] A smiling agent, approaching us at the gate, said, “We heard a cute piggy went through security.” She added, “If you want to pre-board, the cabin crew would love it.”

At the entrance to the plane, we were greeted by three giddy flight attendants: “Oh, my God, don’t you just love her?” “I’m so jealous. I want one!”; “I hope you’re in my section”; “I’m coming back for pictures.”

As we exited at Newark, a member of the flight crew pinned pilot’s wings onto Daphne’s E.S.A. sweatshirt.

Why didn't the pig next to the professor get the same friendly treatment? It too was presented as an emotional-support animal. One difference is that Marx's pig was only 26 pounds, and the one next to the professor is said to have been 50 to 70 pounds. The latter pig was also described as smelly and "disruptive." I'll also guess that the lady sitting next to the professor was not as smooth a talker as Marx, who was creating material for what turned out to be a hilarious and disturbing New Yorker article.

"I decided to go undercover as a person with an anxiety disorder (not a stretch) and run around town with five un-cuddly, non-nurturing animals for which I obtained E.S.A. credentials..."

Patricia Marx uncovers the rampant scam that is goes by the name emotional-support animal.

The first animal I test-drove was a fifteen-pound, thirteen-inch turtle. I tethered it to a rabbit leash, to which I had stapled a cloth E.S.A. badge (purchased on Amazon), and set off for the Frick Collection....

Here’s what happened at the Chanel boutique: “Hello. I’m looking for a pocketbook that will match my snake,” I said to a salesman. “Maybe something in reptile.”... he salesman handed me a smart, yellow python bag marked $9,000. “I think this would work the best. It’s one of our classics. I think yellow. Red makes the snake look too dull.”...

Henry was a Royal Palm [turkey]...

An alpaca... been granted permission to clomp through the premises of a national treasure that houses hundreds of priceless antiques...

I’m pleased to report that passing through security with a pig in your arms is easier than doing so without one....

Much more at the link.