"This is America showing itself because it was never in you in the first place. So why am I upset that you're upending something..."

"... that was never in you in the first place? I'm not saying that we shouldn't be upset. We definitely should be upset. But why are we-- we can't be upset at people that it was never in them in the first place to even care about somebody else."

Said a black woman, heard in episode 857 of "This American Life," "Museum of Now."

She is commenting on the removal of the 2-block-long, 50-foot-tall words, "Black Lives Matter," that had been set in concrete in a street near the White House.

Prompted by the question, "Is this more honest, actually, that they actually are ripping this up?," we hear her struggling in real time to understand why the de-installation of the motto wasn't upsetting her or wasn't upsetting her that much.

One might say the original installation was propaganda and pandering. Jackhammering it out of there said something accidental and authentic.

"You studied semiotics in college. I’m curious if that also shapes the way you think of narrative...."

Sarah Larson asks Ira Glass, in "Ira Glass Hears It All/Three decades into 'This American Life,' the host thinks the show is doing some of its best work yet—even if he’s still jealous of 'The Daily'" (The New. Yorker).

Glass answers:

For me, the most important book was “S/Z,” by Roland Barthes, where he takes apart a short story by Balzac phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph. What he’s interested in is, How does this story get its hooks into you? Why do you read to the next paragraph? Why do you care? And that feeling that you get at the end of a really good story, where you just feel, like, Ahh!—what produces that? And he names a bunch of mechanisms that, once you know them, you can create yourself.

"What Nazis?"

I was just listening to Episode 751 of "This American Life," Act One, "Many a Thing She Ought to Understand," by Diane Wu:

I watched The Sound of Music all the time as a kid.... And a few years ago, I was talking with a friend about how much I loved the movie growing up. And he said, me too, though the Nazis scared me. And I said, what Nazis? 

And that's when I learned I'd never seen the second half of the film. 

"Jane was never embarrassed, and for a pretty specific reason. The way she grew up — she was Methodist — she was taught you are not the center of the universe..."

"... which made her feel free, like no one was watching. 'To be embarrassed would be to assume that anyone in this room or anyone who witnessed this actually spends more than 5 seconds thinking about me. And they don't. Why would you think anyone but God gives a shit about anything you're doing, ever? They don't. Like, you are nothing. You mean nothing in the world. It's obnoxious, basically, to think that, like, any of your actions — that anyone is actually looking in your direction.' This worldview, that others weren't judging her, helped her not judge herself. Those thoughts just didn't occur to her."

From Episode 749 of "This American Life," "My Bad" (about embarrassment).

I've thought a lot about embarrassment, and I sometimes wonder what might life could have been if I'd found my way to immunity from embarrassment when I was a child. When you're a really young child, learning to speak, learning to walk, babbling nonsense, falling on your ass every other minute, it's all in good fun, and you never get the idea that everyone's laughing at me and I keep making a fool of myself. You have to learn to be embarrassed, but some people learn not to be embarrassed. 

Can Methodism help? 

"She said, I don't introspect hardly ever, hardly at all — meaning she spends almost no time looking inward."

"She doesn't really think about herself, her thoughts, her feelings about the world almost ever.... Diane says insightful things. She's considerate-- always considerate.... How did she have that insight? She doesn't look inside.... 'Well, since you started asking me about this, I've been thinking about it.... So walking into the grocery store the other night, I was walking in, and I was just like, what would I be thinking about if I were introspecting right now? And I had no idea. I was like, what could you possibly think about besides, there's some red shopping baskets. I'm going to take a red shopping basket. Oh, this is a spinach mix. Is it just spinach, or is there kale? That's literally all that's going on in my head. I can't imagine what else you could be thinking about.'... Here's what I think about at the grocery store. I think, there's a red shopping basket. Should I get a basket or a cart? I don't like the rickety ones. I can't imagine shopping for a big family. I wonder if I'll ever have a big family. That ship has probably sailed. It must be expensive. Why did my mom always ask the person bagging groceries to help her to her car? Whatever happened to Volvos? I bit that hole in the headrest of her Volvo when I was five. Or was I four? She was so sad. Why was I like that? Is that guy looking at me? Is he mad? What's he mad about? I wonder how much that cashier makes? Are people nice to her? It must take a long time to memorize all the codes to the produce so you don't need that sheet anymore. I'd be bad at it. Do people ask her if it's hard? Would she like that question or find it rude? A lot of my thoughts are just imagining other people's thoughts and feelings, all tangled up with my own. It's probably like 95% of what I think about. Diane says she doesn't do that — at all."

 From "731: What Lies Beneath" (This American Life)(transcript)(audio).

The word we're given for what the one woman does is "introspection," but no word is used for what the other (Diane) does. Did they deliberately avoid saying "mindfulness"? Isn't that mindfulness? At the end of the segment, the first woman (Lily) tries making her mind behave like Diane's but never opines about whether it's good or bad and never connects it to anything like "mindfulness" or Zen. I'm guessing — as I introspect — that they must have noticed this larger context but decided not to complicate the presentation that was just about 2 women noticing their minds were different and finding a connection — not with the larger world — but with each other. 

"[T]here's one major difference between this film and the Steven Soderberghian Contagion-like reality we're all living in."

"Because in this movie, the virus is not fatal. It doesn't even cause a fever or a cough. Instead, the main and only symptom is absolute euphoria. That's it. Everyone it infects experiences unbridled happiness and elation. Its victims begin acting kindly to one another, deferential."

From a "This American Life" segment on a 1968 movie called "What's So Bad About Feeling Good?" Transcript. Audio (recommended).

It's a rom com — with Mary Tyler Moore and George Peppard — about a toucan that spreads a virus in New York City. There's massive infection, everyone feels great, stops smoking and drinking, and the political authorities determine that's bad for the economy, so the immediately find a cure for the disease. George Peppard is cured and confronts the uncured Mary Tyler Moore:

Liz: No. Don't ask me to go back. Pete, remember what we had. Remember it. Cling to it.
Pete: You're kidding yourself. Hinklemeyer's right. You talk about goodness and kindness. Read the front page and try to find some.
Liz: Pete, I can't go back. I couldn't live that kind of life, ever again.
Pete: Okay, you drink your poison, and I'll drink mine.

"Do I again go in search of lost time with Marcel Proust, or am I to attempt yet another rereading of Alice Walker’s stirring denunciation of all males, black and white?"

"My former students, many of them now stars of the School of Resentment, proclaim that they teach social selflessness, which begins in learning how to read selflessly. The author has no self, the literary character has no self, and the reader has no self. Shall we gather at the river with these generous ghosts, free of the guilt of past self-assertions, and be baptized in the waters of Lethe? What shall we do to be saved? The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society. Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves."

Wrote Harold Bloom, in "The Western Canon."

That jumped out at me this morning, because I've been thinking about the idea of forgetting oneself.

Last night, I was reading the story, "Kleist in Thun" (from this collection by Robert Walser), and I was struck by this passage:

"I think even if we have to lose, we need to leave our true thoughts in history. We need to let the people behind us know that we've tried."

Said one of the Hong Kong protesters, interviewed on "Umbrellas Up/For over 100 days now, protesters in Hong Kong have taken to the streets every weekend. What it’s like to live through that," an episode of "This American Life" (audio/transcript).

Another said:

I am pretty much pessimistic, actually. I do wish that one day, we all succeed. We want a democratic Hong Kong, but now, I just don't see a way out. Like, it's been three months. We've been trying each and every step. We've broke into the legislative council. We have more than 1,000 people got arrested. But the government is still trying to ignore all of this.... At least the government sees that we are not that-- how do we say-- we are not that obedient. So we have to continuously tell the government that we are not satisfied with what they are giving us. So we have to do it.

Still another (translated from Chinese):

I think we're actually lucky because we grew up with people who thought the same way. And we realized that when we turn 50, it's the end of our freedoms. I'm 22 now, and I imagine that when I'm 25, that's really half way until the bomb explodes. And so if we don't do anything, by the time we're 50 years old, it would be awful. I don't want our children to have the same battle. And then when we're 50, we'll look back and think that we didn't do enough. Our birthday is like a countdown to the end. And so more so than other people, I feel like my generation, we have a duty to do more.

"This American Life" reveals more than you might expect about how Harvard discriminates against Chinese-American applicants.

I strongly recommend this 25-minute segment of "This American Life," "The Veritas Is Out There" (listen at that link or read the transcript). A propos of the lawsuit against Harvard, which alleges that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants, a Chinese-American who did get into Harvard looks at his own admissions file and sees what the alumnus who interviewed him had to say. This student, Alex Zhang, is on Harvard's side in the lawsuit: He wrote an amicus brief supporting Harvard and he got the Chinese Students Association to sign another pro-Harvard amicus brief. He doesn't change sides when he sees what's in his file, but he is sorely challenged.

The interviewer wrote a very long memo, strongly pushing Alex, but you can tell that the interviewer believed that the way to do that is to distinguish him from other Asian-American applicants. At one point the interviewer wrote "was this a perfect for MIT mechanical engineer playing me?" The "This American Life" producer, Diane Wu editorializes: "Perfect for MIT, I guess, is code for too boring for Harvard."

The most telling line in Alex's file is about his mother: "She is far from the stereotypical 'tiger mother.'" Wu asks Alex how he feels about that, and he says "it's true." Wu pushes harder: "Is it weird to you at all that the interviewer is pointing to stereotypes that you aren't? Is he a perfect-for-MIT engineer playing me, or does he have a tiger mom?" Alex concedes, "That's a good point."

Wu knows she's pushing: "As soon as I asked the question, I felt like I overstepped, like I was planting the idea in Alex's head that something racial was going on. But when I heard tiger mother, I thought, there is the implicit bias they're talking about in the lawsuit in a way more explicit form than I was expecting."

Alex cannot resist too much or he'll forfeit credibility: "Yeah, that is really weird. I guess it kind of goes into a narrative like the Asian applicant has to disprove certain things to be considered viable for something ivy league."

Wu paraphrases: "In other words, if you want to get into Harvard, don't be too Asian."

Alex: "Hmm. That makes sense. I don't know what his motivations are, my interviewer's motivations. Maybe the interviewer was like, oh, I should distinguish him from other Asians, or maybe he just does it subconsciously."

Wu:

Alex's friends saw his screen grab [of his admissions file] saying tiger mom and perfect-for-MIT engineer and texted him back, oh, my god and that's kind of horrible. Tiger mom was actually a lot more explicit than any of the examples of bias that came up at the trial. It was really a fight over statistics and economic models, but a few stereotypes did come up. They were subtle. Things like Harvard referring to Asian applicants as one-dimensional or book smart.

So "This American Life" gets Alex talking to the alum who wrote the memo, Jim McCandlish (who is, according to Alex, "an old white guy" with a "Chinese wife"). McCandlish without obvious prompting, reveals an attitude that is — though he doesn't seem to notice — very damaging to Harvard's position in the lawsuit. This is McCandlish:

Most likely, at least certainly from a place like Oregon, the interviewer is Caucasian. And we know there are stereotypes. I'm just curious how that plays out. If you have an expectation that an Asian interviewee is going to have a drab personality or meek and mild, you may play into your stereotype and not develop the rapport that would defeat the stereotype or at least resist it. You're in a really gray area of human nature.

Alex asks him about "tiger mom," and McCandlish says, "Well, recall, I live with one" (that's how he refers to his wife, this man who went to Harvard).  He adds: "I live with a tiger mom and fight it all the time." (I'm not sure what "it" is. Does he fight the tigerish qualities of his own wife or is he fighting other people who hold negative stereotypes against persons of Chinese descent?)

Later, McCandlish says — and remember, he went to Harvard — "I use that term because I'm an Amy Tan fan." He must have meant Amy Chua, author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." Amy Tan is another author, as Wu explains. Tan wrote "The Joy Luck Club." (But see this review of Amy Tan's memoir "Where the Past Begins" that says it would make sense to call it "Post-Battle Hymn Of The Damaged Daughter Of A Tiger Mother.")

In an interview with Wu that McCandlish didn't allow to be recorded, Wu says he admitted that he was trying to get Alex in by — in Wu's words — "overtly pointing out to the admissions officers that Alex was different from other Chinese-American applicants. That this young man did not fit whatever stereotypes that he or the admissions officers might have."

Later, we hear Alex wondering why having a "tiger mom" should count against you: "Is that not part of your upbringing and who you are now?... There seems to be these very negative connotations about the way Asians are raised or the way that they behave growing up. And it just seems like there's this very deeply ingrained prejudice and misunderstanding."

I'd love to discuss the new episode of "This American Life" — "Five Women."

"A different kind of #MeToo story, about several women who worked for the same man. They tell us not only about their troubling encounters with him, but also about their lives beforehand. Who were they when they entered the workplace, and how did their personal histories shape the way they dealt with his harassment?"

I didn't listen to it carefully enough the first time, and I went back to the beginning to relisten and realized immediately how badly I had misunderstood the ideas that were being framed and presented. I was a little distracted the first time — cooking, pausing to talk to M, etc. — and I was also distorted by my own presumption that TAL would get in line with #MeToo dogma and believe the accusers and hate the man. But on second listen, I was shocked at how wrong I was and how much depth was present in the story. It's subtle. Are the women criticized for their behavior, their complicity, their cold pursuit of self-interest? In the end, I think, the real respect women deserve is to be seen as fully human, and that entails complexity. There's a lot going on here, and I would love to talk about it with people who have listened to the whole thing and listened carefully. Maybe the producers are afraid to cross the #MeToo dogmatists and they used ambiguity to fend off criticism, but I think they are genuinely dedicated to the art of radio and the full depth of humanity.

"Is it just me, or has testosterone been in the news more lately? I blame Donald Trump!"

"Or maybe Rush Limbaugh. Althouse links to this recently rebroadcast episode of This American Life about testosterone, where there’s an interview with a woman who 'transitioned' into being a man with the help of colossal doses of testosterone."

Says Instapundit, pointing at something I wrote yesterday. After quoting the interviewee's saying that she "became interested in science," he continues:

It’s funny, I was talking to a friend a while back who was very interested in math and science pre-puberty, but lost nearly all interest afterward, and she said, “when the estrogen came in, the science went out.”

Some other stuff in this interview reminds me of my friend (and former editor) Norah Vincent, who lived as a man for a year and wrote a great book, Self-Made Man. She, too, said that as a “bulldyke” woman, she was very masculine, but as a man — in her case, without hormones — she wasn’t all that masculine for a man. And that it was a lot harder to be a man than women think.

Meanwhile, also from This American Life, the most NPR line ever: “I have rage. Unfortunately, it’s impotent rage.” Also, the highest testosterone level among the NPR males is 274, which I believe is treatably low. . . . .

Plus: “If I can’t be the most manly in public radio, where the hell can I be the most manly?”

You might want to connect this to the recent episode of "Survivor," in which a gay man outed a female-to-male transgender. Writing about that a couple days ago, I mentioned that we'd been watching the show believing that "we were looking at a not-terribly-masculine gay man." Varner, the gay man who outed the the other contestant wasn't someone I would assume was gay. He'd have to tell me. Now, Varner caught hell not just for outing his tribe-mate (Zeke). He was also condemned for characterizing closetedness as deception. Here's an interview with Varner:

"I will say that I have spent 10 months stewing in this awful, horrible mistake I made. I have been through I don’t now how much therapy with the show’s therapist, with a local therapist, I have met with and spoken to several LGBT organizations, I have joined the board of a couple of them, I joined a national study on outness. This has changed me drastically. But I don’t want to spend two minutes talking about my experience because this isn’t about me. This is about Zeke. And I can only profusely apologize."

There's a lot there about etiquette and human decency that's complicated by the competition (which everyone knows entails deception and manipulating other people's fears about being deceived and played for a fool (with $1 million at stake)). Varner blundered and is paying a big price. But I wonder how he, as a gay man, felt about Zeke's presenting himself as a gay man. Those of us in the majority — the nongay — should perhaps not be so judgmental about how a gay man feels when a transgender male chooses to present as gay when that person seems relatively unmasculine.

The transgender person Instapundit quoted also said that her — and later, his — role models were James Dean and Jason Priestley, and that "I was better at that as a dyke than I am as a man, I have to say." And:

"It's a bit of a disappointment. It's a bit of a disappointment. I often ask people, what kind of a guy am I? What do you see? And unfortunately, people often respond that they see a nerd, which I never was before. I was always really cool and popular and hip and whatever.

So this person was perceived edgily masculine by people who were seeing what they thought of as a woman, but a boring nerd by those who were perceiving a man. And that was with the testosterone.

ADDED: Nothing against nerds. Nerd can be the identity you embrace. If that's what you want, go for it. 

"He said, 'Do you practise? Which mosque do you go to? What is the name of the imam? How often do you go to the mosque? What kind of discussions do you hear in the mosque? Does the imam talk to you directly?'"

From "Canadian woman turned away from U.S. border after questions about religion, Trump 'We found videos on your phone that are against us,' Fadwa Alaoui says she was told by a border agent."

That made me think of a segment of this week's episode of "This American Life": "Heavy Vetting":

One of the justifications for the executive order from the administration was that we needed to temporarily stop admitting immigrants and refugees from these seven countries in order to scrutinize and improve the vetting process. Ira speaks with the vetters about how they vet and what they make of the new order. (11 minutes)

(The transcript isn't available yet, but I urge you to listen. The vetters complain that they were not consulted about the change in policy and that they in fact have long been doing what they consider to be "heavy vettting." That segment made a big impact on me. Anyway, the questions in the post title sound an awful lot like what those vetters were saying they have been doing for years.)

"My grandparents’ generation, which benefited a lot from him, will feel very strongly. In my parents’ generation, there is also still a lot of loyalty."

 "In my generation, you’ll see more differences. In a large portion of the young people, what you will see is apathy."

From a NYT piece about how young people in Cuba are reacting to the death of Fidel Castro.

There's another post linking to the Castro obituary. Please limit comments here to the subject of generational differences in reacting to a big political event. You don't have to limit yourself to reactions to the death of Castro.

In fact, let me get the expansion going in a good direction by adding something from the November 13th episode of "This American Life," which was about reactions to Trump's victory in the American election. We hear from Janelle, a young black comedienne, who says that "all the older black people" she's talked to are not surprised that Trump won. The mother does not speak on the radio show. We're not told the specific age of the mother or daughter, and we only hear the daughter's presentation:

I called her thinking she would be even worse than me, and she was so chill that it was surprising. I called her, and I was like, can you believe this? And she was like, you know where we live.... It's kind of resigned. I feel like that's how black people are. We're just like, this is how it's gonna be. And you get little moments of reprieve. Like, I guess Obama here and there. But it always comes back. Like, we're just always waiting for the shoe to drop. And it's an ever-present thing that we have to deal with, this feeling of being just always, this [BLEEP] is dangerous is how I feel, you know. [BLEEP] surrounded..... Whereas maybe before, I had forgotten. That's what happens. You forget. And then this [BLEEP] happens. And you're like, oh yeah. We know where we live, like my mother says. Like, that's basically what she was saying, like, oh, you forgot.... It just calmed me down. I'm not, like, oh, now everything's going to be fine. I'm still like, people are just on alert.

"December 1, we'll probably start climbing out from the smoking ruin and say, 'anybody else alive around here?'"

"It'll be like The Walking Dead, right? We're going to try to come up with bands of people and walk across the country, and just not get ourselves killed or eaten, and hook up with people we think are not insane or horrible or in some way murderous. That's exactly what it's going to be like."

Post-election anxiety about putting the ruined party back together.

Imagined, pre-election, by a Republican.

I'm listening to the podcast of the episode of "This American Life" that aired on October 28th. The quote above is an answer to the question framed by host Ira Glass: "This is the big question for all these guys — what's their party going to be after November 8? What's it going to stand for?"  All these guys were "center-right" Republicans — "basically Reagan Republicans," guys with "old school conservative ideals." The guy answering the question is Rob Long of the podcast "Ricochet."

It's funny listening to the show now, because without saying as much, it's obviously premised on the assumption that Donald Trump is going to lose. I know "funny" isn't the word many people would use to describe the period of American life that began on Election Day night, and I'm sorry if I'm a bad person for finding it very funny. It's not that I'm happy with Trump. I wasn't a Trump supporter, but I couldn't stand Hillary either. I'm just experiencing a lot of the aftermath of the election as very funny. Like, why did we just spend the weekend talking about "Hamilton"?

"But it felt like there was an invisible force blocking me from achieving my dreams. Sure, I'd think, is it because I'm fat?"

"But then I'd think, don't be paranoid. I refused to believe that people were that shallow. It had to be more complicated. I tried to put my finger on it, but I just couldn't figure it out. Once I lost weight [110 pounds], I realized, it was all because I was fat. It felt like that famous Eddie Murphy sketch on Saturday Night Live, where he goes undercover in whiteface and gets treated way better. He rides the city bus. And when the last black rider gets off, music starts. A cocktail waitress in a sequined dress hands out martinis. That's what I felt like — like this whole other world for thin people had existed alongside mine, a world they've been keeping a secret from me. When I was fat and I walked down the street, people would stare. I'd hear comments that I would ignore. Occasionally someone would shout something out at me. In this new world, when I walked down the street, attractive men and women would do something to me they'd never done before. They would look me up and down, and then they would nod their heads. Thin people nod at each other?"

From the "Tell Me I'm Fat" episode of "This American Life."

"I used to write a comedy show. The letters I got were pretty awful — sexist, violent, rude."

"Some of them I still remember word for word. I wrote back to every person and responded very nicely. I asked them if they wanted to write an episode, and I said I would be really happy if they did and I would work with them. It was amazing how my putting a human face on the correspondence changed the tenor of it. Many responded to me. Some apologized. All were sheepish."

That's a letter from SAS in Newton, Massachusetts that the NYT received in response to its article — which we discussed here — about 2 women sportscasters who'd made a video of themselves listening to men reading their hate mail to them.

SAS's response reminds me of an episode of This American Life: "If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS."

So I did what you're not supposed to do. I fed the troll. I wrote about [him on line].

The morning after that post went up, I got an email. "Hey Lindy, I don't know why or even when I started trolling you.... I think my anger towards you stems from your happiness with your own being. It offended me because it served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self....

I'm done being a troll. Again, I apologize. I made a donation in memory to your dad. I wish you the best."

The episode continues with a phone conversation with the apologetic former troll, who says, among other things: "You know, it's like you stand on the desk and you say, I'm Lindy West, and this is what I believe in. Fuck you if you don't agree with me. And even though you don't say those words exactly, I'm like, who is this bitch who thinks she knows everything?"

"Gorgeous. Pretty. Stunning."/"Stunning? Yeah."/"You kill it. You're so pretty. So beautiful."

The extremely repetitious, endlessly affirming things teenagers comment on each others selfies on Instagram... analyzed in a segment of "This American Life" (transcript, as well as audio, at the link). Ira Glass is talking to 2 girls who are 13 and 14 and trying to figure out what he calls "dissecting and calibrating the minutiae of the social diagram."

The girls have "this thing they do all the time" and Ira has the thing that he does all the time, which is find what is surprising and profound inside whatever people are doing in this life.

This is super-affirming language that is applied equally to every girl, universally. You've heard of bullying online? This is the opposite.... So what's it about? Well, the answer to that question is complicated, and it involves going deep into an intricate language that's going on in the comments.... Then, of course, when you do post a comment about a picture, there's the whole politics of whether your friend is going to comment back to your comment. And subtle differences in the wording when they comment back could mean something, even though, to an outsider, the words basically look the same....

3 "Price Is Right" things.

1. Via Metafilter, here's a recent episode of "The Price Is Right," displaying in split-screen what goes on behind the scenes.



2. From a recent "This American Life" episode titled "I Was So High," there was a segment about a guy named Josh Androsky who'd been drinking and "doing mushrooms," who for some reason thinks it's a good idea to join the studio audience of "The Price is Right" and the gets the "Come on down" call:

Already without mushrooms it would have been crazy.... Because, literally, old people are dancing with children in the aisles. This one old lady starts booty dancing on Drew Carey. There were just dollar signs and flashing lights. I mean, everybody's going crazy. We were, demonstrably, the least high-looking people there.

Hilarity ensues as he bids $1 on everything, actually wins once (on some damn ring everyone else overprices), and — asked what he does for a living — says he's "a skateboard rabbi."

Drew Carey turns to me and goes, how do you incorporate skateboards into Judaism? I was like, well, Drew Carey, we go to local high schools and attempt to turn religious extremism into religious "X-tremism!"

That fabulous joke did not make the edit of the show that airs, which you can partake of here.

3. I'm not too familiar with the show in its recent form, and by recent, I mean anything after Bill Cullen. It's not just Drew Carey that's unfamiliar. Even Bob Barker doesn't seem to belong. To me Bob Barker belongs on "Truth or Consequences."

"It is all around us all the time. High people mingling with us, working, passing, laughing extra hard at our jokes. We don't even know why."

Said Ira Glass, introducing the "I Was So High" episode of "This American Life."

ADDED: Read this segment of the transcript, interviewing Dr. Ethan Bryson, author of "Addicted Healers/5 Key Signs Your Healthcare Professional May Be Drug Impaired":

"It was the first time I've had to hide a New Yorker post from my Facebook feed. Blech."

Says a commenter at Television Without Pity, responding to another commenter who said:

Wow, I don't think I can watch any more of this.

This, being the HBO series "Girls."

I hate the nudity and everything else. And, yes, I am shallow and I don't enjoy [Lena] Dunham's very odd body and the unnecessary reveals. And I HATE those freaking tattoos. That's part of the problem when she dresses up for something like the Globes. The dress was hideous on her and those tats were gross as always. The nudity for no reason? Like when they stopped to hike?...  Hannah lies down on the ground and we -- lucky lucky us -- can see up her skirt. Why? It's distracting and unattractive and took me out of the weird scene because I was trying to figure out if she had underwear on or not. And why her ass was hanging out at all.

Here's the New Yorker item with the photograph of Hannah in the is-she-wearing-underpants position that needed to be hidden in the TWoP commenter's Facebook feed. The New Yorker writer, Sasha Weiss, describing the relevant scene in episode 2 of the new season, says: