Ken's Blog

I was surprised to read in a late breaking bulletin this morning of the arrest of candidate for the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor. Apparently she had been seen trying to force open the front door of her downtown New York City apartment building. It later came out that the door was temporarily jammed, but meanwhile the sight of this latina woman fiddling with an apparently locked door had apparently aroused the suspicion of a neighbor who lived on the same fashionable Greenwich Village street.

It is not entirely clear what transpired next. According to NYC police officer James Shepard, when he entered Sotomayor’s home and asked to see her identification, the judge “began acting weirdly”. As Shepard later told the sympathetic hosts of a right-wing radio talk show, Sotomayor started dancing the salsa around the apartment and loudly singing the song “America” from “West Side Story”, in spanish. Then, according to officer Shepard, the 54 year old woman brandished a switch blade and said to him “You gonna get out now or I gotta cut you?”

It was at this point, according to officer Shepard, that he invited Sotomayor to step outside so that the two of them could continue their conversation out in the street – apparently a standard request that the police make when they have just tried to arrest somebody for breaking into their own home. But at this point something unexpected happened – David Axelrod, top advisor to president Barack Obama, showed up at the door, apparently for a scheduled meeting with Judge Sotomayor.

According to officer Shepard, Axelrod – who is Jewish, although the police officer hastened to add that the man’s ethnicity was irrelevant – took one look at the police officer and began cursing in what sounded like Hebrew, although officer Shepard reported that it might also have been a dialect of ancient Aramaic, like in that movie.

Mr. Axelrod then somehow produced a live chicken, which he proceeded to twirl over his head while pointing at the dumbfounded police officer and muttering what sounded like Kabbalistic incantations. It was at this point, according to officer Shepard, that he made the decision to arrest both of them on charges of disturbing the peace. Charges of bribery were later added for Mr. Axelrod when, as officer Shepard explained it, the well-known political consultant pulled him aside and offered to sell him major-brand electronics equipment “at below wholesale prices”.

The New York City police later decided to release both suspects. In a press conference from the White House blue room, president Obama called the officer’s response “stupid”, but then relented and invited the three of them to the White House to talk it over.

The President was quoted as saying “This has all apparently been a misunderstanding, nothing that can’t be resolved amicably over a cuba libre and, um, some Manischewitz.”

I was quite pleased when a good friend told me today how fascinated she was by my blog posts of the last two days – first my description of a Jazz-era novel celebrating carnal relations between a woman and a sewing machine, and then my learned disquisition on the entire subgenre of illicit love between humans and their household appliances, as well as the subsequent political suppression of this literary form on suspicion of being part of a vast communist conspiracy.

It took a moment for me to realize that my friend was taking these two posts at face value. When I wrote them it had never occurred to me that people would think this was a real book or a real literary movement. I must say I was quite pleased to hear that were at least somewhat convincing. If anything, I had worried that the entire premise was so patently ridiculous that nobody would see the humor in it.

Back when I was in high school there was a rule that said that if you wrote a book review, it had to be about an actual book that really existed. You couldn’t just make something up out of whole cloth. Although I do recall that in the twelfth grade, Bill Bauer earned my undying respect and admiration for turning in a report, together with extensive footnotes and properly formatted references, whose subject was an entirely made up book. The teacher gave Bill an A for this report, and singled it out in class as exemplary work. None of us felt any particular need to inform the teacher that Bill had made the entire thing up out of his head. We were far too lost in admiration of our classmate’s bold and brilliant feat to even think of ratting him out.

Now that I’m all grown up and don’t need to worry about grades, it occurs to me that I can write about any book – those already born and those as yet unborn, as the Mormons would say. Well, actually, the Mormons go even further and also talk about the rights of “the formerly living”. But when they do that they are not actually referring to books. Rather, they are referring to lists of names of dead Jews (they seem to particularly seek out Jew names for some reason) so they can baptize the lot of them post-death, in order to send as many souls to heaven as possible, possibly so as to ensure their own welcome there.

You think I’m making that last part up, but I’m not. The phrase “formerly living” actually shows up prominently on signage in the Mormon Church’s museum in Salt Lake City. If you visit there, don’t stand around reading the signage for too long, or else people dressed in weirdly midcentury clothing are likely to save your soul while you’re not looking, and you may find yourself dressing up in outfits left over from the Eisenhower era and selling pencils in the Utah airport.

But I digress….

It seems to me that once you open book review subjects up to books that *might* exist, but just don’t happen to exist in this particular parallel universe, then the space of possibilities grows exponentially. Besides, there’s always the possibility that if you pen a good enough description of a book, somebody will one day come along and actually write the damned thing.

Don’t laugh. After Kurt Vonnegut dropped enough mentions throughout his novels of the fictional author Kilgore Trout, Trout went ahead and actually wrote a book – Venus on the Half-Shell OK, it was actually Philip José Farmer only pretending to be Kilgore Trout, but it was still pretty cool.

Don’t you think?

Curious about the novel discussed in yesterday’s post, I did a little digging. You can’t find out much about it on Google (or on Bing for that matter), but a visit to the old stacks of the New York Public Library reveals some surprising things. It seems there was an entire literary movement in the early part of the twentieth century that featured illicit affairs between humans and their (then newfangled) electrical appliances.

A robust underground publishing industry sprang up to fill this need, in magazines with names like “Bakelite!”, containing shocking stories with plots ranging from dalliances between fair damsels and their alarm clocks to secret midnight trysts between ardent young men and their waffle irons. There was a certain sameness to these tales, an underlying dramatic arc that was rigidly adhered to. This is not surprising – structural predictability is common to all genres of erotica down through the ages. Invariably the human half, who is inevitably portrayed as young, attractive, with excellent prospects, first notices the appliance under somewhat hazy circumstances. There is generally an early scene of “plugging in” (my research indicates that this was the preferred term of art), a phrase which refers to the first moment that the appliance is seen to operate – at which point the young man or woman is instantly smitten.

The dearth of opportunities for conversation between human and appliance seems to be central to the allure of these romances. Apparently the enigmatic nature of the electromechanical Other is crucial to its appeal. Not surprisingly, there is little or no representation in the genre of dalliances between human and telephone, or radio, or any other household appliance that might incorporate a human voice. The possibility of true communication would negate the essential mystery.

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 seems to have put an end to this odd form of literary expression, and for a time it was forgotten entirely. But shortly after World War II a new generation of scholars rediscovered the form. You may recall that the period immediately following W.W.II was a time of renewed interest in all things Freudian – fascination with the unconscious mind and its desires was finding expression in genres as diverse as feature films and comic books.

During this period a number of doctoral dissertations appeared, each positing a theory for the brief but spectacular popularity of Appliance Erotica, as it came to be called. Some of these theses are interesting in their own right, notably “Running Hot and Cold: The Water Tap as an Agent of Seduction” (Harvard Press, 1950), “The Auto, the Erotic and the Autoerotic: Mythopoesis of the Household Station Wagon” (Yale University Press, 1948), “The Brave Little Toaster: Kitchen Implement as Transgressive Seducer in American Fiction” (Princeton, 1951). This last thesis was eventually adapted into a well received animated film by the Walt Disney Company, although in a form so changed as to be essentially unrecognizable.

This show of interest in academic circles was, alas, short-lived. By 1952 the rise to power of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee made it politically untenable to pursue such areas of intellectual inquiry – even tenured faculty were not immune to scrutiny.

The government made it clear that household appliances were sacrosanct, a part of the wholesome American dream. Key members of Congress felt that any attempt to unduly eroticize an appliance must surely be symptomatic of a larger pattern of communist infiltration. It was during the widely seen “Waring Testimony” of January 1953, when Fred Waring himself – beloved bandleader and radio star, and inventor of the eponymous food processor – famously declared “I unplug my blender at night.”

Around this time the federal government began a stealth propaganda campaign to fight the pernicious threat of appliance love, thought by many to be a plot by the Kremlin to corrupt America’s youth. Young people were exhorted to “keep it clean with your machine.” In advertisements around this time, the iconography of the kitchen and its electrical appliances began to project a peculiarly – even perversely – wholesome image.

Soon the love of appliances lost its erotic frisson. Functional objects ceased to hold sexual allure, reverting back to the mere machines they were. Eventually everyone realized that the entire movement had been a form of collective madness, an aberrant loss of judgement on the part of otherwise sane and intelligent people. Americans would never again make complete idiots of themselves by foolishly looking upon a mere man-made object – a thing of buttons and electrical parts – with unbridled and wanton desire.

Except, of course, for the iPhone.

I first came upon J. Botangier’s “The Needle and the Stitch” in the Strand Bookstore on Broadway near 12th Street. The Strand is the kind of bookstore that sells just about every imaginable kind of used volume. So finding an obscure American romance novel from the 1920s was not all that surprising. But, as I was soon to discover, this was no ordinary book.

Our heroine, Katherine Olmsley, is one of those heedless and headstrong young women one often finds in novels of this kind. Her upbringing in an old and respected Boston family, one that came “from old money”, as they say, only serves to highlight her rebellion against propriety. By the time we meet Kate, in her early twenties, she is a fully formed flapper, breaking young mens’ hearts left and right, knowing where all the right parties are, able to hold her own in debates about the latest scandalous ideas from Freud, even when tanked up on speakeasy gin.

All of this changes when she meets Rodney. For the first time she finds a deep connection, a soulmate. She is willing to overlook the fact that Rodney is different, even the fact that he is a household appliance. Sadly for our heroine, nobody seems to understand – not her family, her friends, the party people she thought were her true pals. When Rodney comes upon the scene, they all desert her.

And so woman and sewing machine set up house in a tenement on the lower east side. Unlike the young men she had been running with, Rodney is the perfect companion. He never complains, does not stay out late drinking with the boys, never even looks at another gal. When she comes home at night he is always waiting for her.

Certain intimate details of their relationship are elided over, as was generally the case for novels in this period. Perhaps this is for the best – the reader is left to exercise her imagination as to the nature of their bond. Besides, it must be admitted that a certain delicate level of euphemism is called for when discussing relations between flesh and machinery.

Suffice it to say that the relationship blossoms, deepens. Out of their impassioned lovemaking progeny inevitably emerges. At first only a hat, some gloves, the occasional woolen scarf. But eventually they hit their stride, they learn to understand each other in the way that only true lovers can. Kate opens a shop in midtown – the eponymous “Needle and the Stitch”. Word quickly spreads about the fine quality clothing to be had at the intrepid little emporium. Each item seems to be made with a kind of love rarely seen in such merchandise.

I won’t spoil the novel for you by giving too much away. Suffice it to say that if you pick up this little gem you won’t be disappointed. Not that it’s a perfect book. There are places where the thread of the narrative wears thin. And other places that could have used a firm editorial snip of the scissors.

But there are also madcap goings that will leave you in stitches, as well as lyrical and heartbreaking chapters, like the one where Kate, overworked and feeling hemmed in, is temporarily wooed away from her true love, tempted into a hot and torrid romance by a smooth operating steam press named Max. Will cooler heads prevail? Will our dear heroine eventually patch things up with Rodney? Will the two lovers end up tying the knot?

I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it for you. You’ll just have to read Botangier’s little masterpiece for yourself.

I enjoy doing puzzles, whether they be crossword puzzles, sudoku, ken-ken (a recent addition to The New York TImes’ puzzle page), pretty much anything that requires only a pen and a little time. Challenges in puzzles seem soothing to me, restful, whereas challenges in real life can be very stressful indeed.

I used to think that this difference is due entirely to the “magic circle” effect – the fact that the outcome of a puzzle has no real-word consequences. According to this theory, the puzzler understands that they are in a safe place, and therefore can exercise their brain without fear.

But recently I have come to see another difference, one that might be more fundamental. A crossword or sudoku or ken-ken puzzle, unlike problems in the real world, always has a solution. You know for certain, from the very outset, that the Answer is already in there, hidden within the puzzle itself like the prize in a treasure hunt, simply waiting for you to find it.

I would argue that this might be the salient quality of puzzles that makes them so appealing. We deal every day with the weirdness and downright disturbing nature of reality – arguments with friends and strangers that can seem to come out of nowhere, our nation’s economy taking odd and sometimes ominous turns with little or no warning, wars, hurricanes, unexpected illnesses or even deaths of friends or family members. The entire world can seem like a problem with no solution, a continuing set of difficult questions for which the only answer might very well be “There is no answer”.

But a puzzle’s ability to be solved is guaranteed, even before we put pen to paper, a fact which provides a deep source of comfort. We know that our puzzle had an author, that there is somebody out there, even if it’s somebody we will likely never meet, who is looking out for us. And so we know that in this little artificial world there is indeed always an Answer, unlike the situation we face in the often cruel, capricious and chaotic world of our lives.

So I would argue that it may not be so much the fact that puzzles have no real-world consequences, but rather it is their epistemological appeal – in the world of a puzzle there is always a wise (and for the most part benevolent) Creator – that makes puzzle solving so appealing as comfort food for the mind.

I was going to post a comment in response to Dagmar’s comment on yesterday’s post, but I realized there is enough here to warrant another post. In particular, I was struck by her observation that these TV networks would not be violating this woman’s privacy unless there was an audience out there willing to tune in.

OK, intellectually I understand that there must be millions of people who tuned in to watch while Fox and CBS showed excerpts from that video. But I’m having trouble understanding why those people thought it was ok to watch.

Only when I read Dagmar’s insightful comment I did start to grapple with the disturbing fact that there must be a large audience eager to watch while CBS and Fox engage in deliberate abuse of an innocent party. I hadn’t thought about this before because it had never even occurred to me to watch that video. I’m sure it’s easy to find on the internet, but it seems to me that anyone who watches it, whether on the internet or on TV, is violating another person’s right to privacy.

Here’s the analogy that comes to mind: Suppose John is with a friend in a restaurant, and a diner at the next table goes to the restroom, leaving their pocketbook on their seat. John’s friend reaches into the pocketbook and pulls out two crisp twenty dollar bills. The friend puts one bill in his own pocket and hands the other to John, saying “Hey look, free money!” John takes the money, reasoning that he didn’t steal it, his friend did.

That’s pretty much the position you are in if you willingly watch that puerile video on Fox or CBS. You didn’t air it, they did, so you can tell yourself that you don’t need to take responsibility for watching it. Except that you do. Being a willing audience for such things makes you exactly as guilty as John was in that restaurant.

In my view, each of us – every citizen – has an ethical obligation to pointedly avoid watching Fox News or CBS Early Edition – at all – until those networks apologize for violating the public trust and that woman’s rights. Otherwise we are condoning and encouraging this sort of abuse.

You might not agree. In which case I humbly suggest – assuming you do not wish to be a surprise guest on a national news program – that you make very sure there are no hidden cameras in your bathroom.

Today I read that some peeping tom recently took illicit videos of an ESPN network sports reporter through the peephole of her closed hotel room door, capturing footage of the unsuspecting woman while she was naked. Amazingly, it was reported, both the CBS Early Show and Fox News had opted to show portions of the video on air.

If you haven’t heard about this, you’ll probably think I’m making that last part up. After all, logic tells us that this woman’s basic rights had been violated – a rather unsavory crime – so surely no responsible news organization would reward such a crime by repeating the violation on national television. That kind of coverage is the ultimate encouragement of continued criminal activity, the kind of validation most voyeurs could only dream about. But thanks to CBS and Fox, for one lucky peeping tom the dream has become a reality.

Since it’s inconceivable that any news organization could actually be either that stupid or that venal (as in “Gosh, let’s join forces with this criminal and help him to violate this poor woman, because that will make our ratings go up”), one must presume that both organizations were following some higher principle, some enlightened path so evolved that it eludes the minds of us ordinary folks.

Fortunately for you, gentle readers, I have obtained inside info – unreleased documents from top-secret executive planning sessions – showing that Fox and CBS made this transition into blatantly criminal activity as a way to raise the consciousness of our nation. It seems that we are merely seeing the start of a continuing lesson in civics, as the producers at these news networks work to expose crime in a truly novel way: By participating in it. For example, in the case of the peeping tom video, they wanted us to understand on a visceral level the monstrousness, the sheer violation, of the invasion of privacy that occurred in that hotel. And the best way to do that was to themselves publicly commit the same crime against the same victim, while millions of Americans watched in horrified disgust.

The actual documents delineating network plans for the fall lineup are too long to reprint here. But I can give you a glimpse of some highlights, a preview of the coming television season, as these esteemed news organizations collectively continue their ongoing foray into civics education:

August: Fox News exposes Michael Vicks’ brutal exploitation of innocent canines by bringing some dogs onto the show, and then proceeding to viciously bludgeon each one to death with a baseball bat, while the studio audience is encouraged to take bets on the order of their demise. In this way we are all made to become more sensitive to the plight of man’s best friend in today’s world.

September: Rising to this challenge, CBS Early Edition brings an assortment of small children from Darfur onto the set, and the news anchors proceed to hack them all into pieces with machetes. By the end of the segment nothing is left but a pool of blood and assorted body parts. Surely such a demonstration will raise our collective consciences, causing millions of caring Americans to open our hearts and pocketbooks in order to ease the plight of our African neighbors.

October: Fox News mails innocuous looking letters to all one hundred senators, as well as all four hundred and thirty five members of the House of Representatives. Each letter has been surreptitiously laced with the deadly Ebola virus. Within five days every member of congress is dead – except for Al Franken, who it turns out is immune. Speaking on behalf of a stunned nation, President Obama profusely thanks Fox News for raising our collective awareness of the potential dangers of postal terrorism.

November: Not to be outdone, CBS Early Edition detonates a 0.5 megaton nuclear device in downtown Chicago, thereby wiping that great midwestern city from the map, killing several million people outright, and effectively making the region uninhabitable for a radius of about a hundred miles around. Americans watching at home get the point, and rally around ongoing negotiations with Russia toward mutual nuclear disarmament.

And so it continues, as our intrepid news organizations, newly empowered with civic zeal, teach us one valuable lesson after another. Looking over the lineup for the coming year, I think it’s really wonderful that these networks are taking such an interest in the teaching of social awareness. Personally though, I’m a little nervous about next April. That’s when Fox News is scheduled to do a segment on the Holocaust.

I find it touching and rather sweet that Microsoft has named its new search engine after a beloved American singer. Bing Crosby is sometimes overlooked by newer generations, but his innovative vocal stylings on such classics as “Swinging on a Star” and “White Christmas” influenced Sinatra and many others, resulting in a cascade of musical influences that have inspired many in the biz, from Bono to Amy Winehouse. Until its introduction of “Bing”, which is quite an impressive piece of software btw, I hadn’t realized that Microsoft possessed such a high level of subtlety and sensitivity to our nation’s formative pop-cultural influences.

I hope they continue in the spirit of this lovely gesture to Der Bingle. Here are some modest suggestions, likewise drawn from the golden age of great crooners. In the spirit of Louie Armstrong, a technology to let you carry all your data with you, accessible from any browser, could be called “Satchmo”. After all, how better than to suggest that “the internet is the computer” is a winning strategy than by honoring the man who sang “That Lucky Old Sun”.

And rather than naming their new gesture based interaction system “Natal”, now that it is tantalizingly close to reality, perhaps they could honor the Chairman of the Board himself and call it “Ole Blue Eyes”. After all, Sinatra gave us such classics as “High Hopes”, “The World is in my Arms” and “I Believe”.

Even Vista might be resurrected and renamed “Dean”, after Dean Martin, the great mid-century vocalist who gave us such classics as “You’re Breaking my Heart”, “Just One More Chance” and “Have a Little Sympathy”. And for distributed computing over the internet, why not rebrand the rather overworked phrase “Cloud Computing” in a way that would truly set Microsoft apart from certain highly touted competitors? They could call it “The Velvet Fog”, in honor of Mel Tormé. On the other hand, Mr. Tormé was known for singing “Cast your Fate to the Wind” and “Perfidia”, so that might not really be sending the right message.

But one could argue that naming too many product offerings after singers now long dead is a risky value proposition. Memories are short, and Microsoft is already taking a substantial risk with its brave new product title, given that Bing Crosby passed from this mortal coil in 1977 – long before many of today’s users of internet search were even born. So I would suggest that the company hedge its bets, by including at least one pop singer who is not long dead, but merely, say, freshly dead. Along those lines, perhaps they could introduce a utility that blocks unwanted ads from showing up on your desktop. It would be called, of course, “The King of Pop”.

We are so utterly immersed in our cyber-enhanced world that it can be hard to properly understand the context surrounding the historic event of forty years ago today, so thoroughly does our current world view skew our perception of the word “technology”. To put things in proper perspective, the total computational power involved in the Apollo mission to the Moon was far less than the computing power contained in your cell phone.

When JFK launched his grand challenge to put a man on the Moon and bring him safely back before the decade was out, not even five years had elapsed since the first simple integrated circuit had been demonstrated in a laboratory. Telephones did not have computers in them. Nor did cars, ovens, toys, hotel doors, stereos, or the myriad other objects in one’s daily life.

Yes, there was already a fantasy of a technological future – the Jetsons come to mind – but that was more of a physical fantasy than a cybernetic one. The coolest thing about the Jetsons was their flying car – a natural extension of post-war America’s extended love affair with the automobile, and a collective cultural desire that dates back to Henry Ford in 1908.

Similarly George Jetson’s robotic housekeeper Rosie was not portrayed as a marvel of artificial intelligence, but rather as a thinly disguised gloss on the 1950s TV character Hazel – a smart-alecky blue collar housekeeper engaged in perpetual affectionate class warfare with her boss, the upwardly mobile suburbanite George Baxter. The only thing that really distinguished Rosie from Hazel was the way she managed to zoom around the house while balancing on what looked like a single tiny roller skate. Again, a celebration of mechanical innovation, not cybernetic advancement.

In other words, the world of the 1960s was still focused on the physical world as the ultimate measure of technological advancement – buildings that were the highest ever, weapons more explosive than any ever built before, jet planes and submarines and automobiles that broke all previous speed records. The most celebrated superhero was still Superman – that master of the physical, celebrated for his unparalleled strength, speed, ability to fly, even X-ray vision. The technological focus of the 1960s was, in essential ways, an extension of the Victorian, with its trains running ever faster, huge steamships sailing across the globe, mighty cities built with ever newer and stronger materials and methods of manufacture – not to mention those X-rays (first discovered in 1875).

In an important way, that first footstep on the Moon was the paramount expression of the Victorian dream – a fantasy come true for anyone who grew up reading Jules Verne, H.G. Welles or Hugo Gernsback. Humans could truly say that they had passed the ultimate physical test – they had shown they could break the bonds that tied our species down to mother Earth.

But once having proved this, there was nowhere else to go. In a sense, the Moon landing was a death knell for such Victorian era dreams. What appeal could a mere train or jet plane or tall building hold for a species that had walked upon another heavenly body? What had been mere hopeful fantasy and speculation from the time of the ancient Greeks – and earlier – was now cold hard fact.

Sure, we could go on to Mars and beyond, but there was no longer any mystery as to whether such a feat was possible. Once human footsteps had touched the surface of the Moon, we knew in our heart of hearts that we could find a way to walk upon the planets.

And so in the four decades that have followed, our culture’s yearnings for technological transcendence have gradually turned 180^o, from outward to inward. Our technological desire has focused less on extending the body, and more on extending the brain. When Neil Armstrong took his first step upon the Moon, forty years ago today, he became the last Victorian hero – the final iconic expression of a world now gone.

Today I noticed a small article in The New York Times. Glancing at the headline, I thought I saw “New Literary Prize in honor of Harry Potter”. Well, that seemed interesting. How often are prestigious literary awards created in honor of fictitious characters from juvenile literature?

When I looked more closely, I realized that the headline had actually said “New Literary Prize in honor of Harold Pinter”. Well, yes, that is considerably more consistent with the world as we know it. Yet by the same token, it is also far less interesting news.

I began to wonder in what sort of parallel universe a prestigious literary award would be named after J.K. Rowling’s intrepid boy wizard. It would, in a sense, be a world that had much in common with our own. For one thing, it would clearly contain Harry Potter, and most likely his friends Ron and Hermione. But it would also likely be a world with a distinctly different set of values and priorities. In other words, interestingly different.

There is a long tradition in science fiction of convergence theories of alternate universes. From Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” to Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” through to the recent “Star Trek” reboot (I wonder whether it is even possible to discuss J.J. Abrams’ recent film without using the word “reboot” at least once), universes that run in parallel with ours always seem to contain eerie coincidences of fact, even when they differ from ours in the fundamental rules of physics itself.

For example, according to Pullman, Cambridge University survives fundamental differences in the nature of humanity itself, while according to Abrams, every parallel universe apparently produces a certain intrepid starship crew with all of its members magically in place, whatever other calamitous events may befall the changed world around them.

The newspaper headline I had so carelessly misread got me to thinking that headlines might be a nice way to define such oddly parallel yet tellingly different alternate universes, worlds running alongside our own that resemble ours in the particulars but diverge in the fundamentals.

Imagine if tomorrow you were to wake up and read a headline along these lines: “Dolly Parton chooses new interim vice president.” What might that say about the world you had just woken up into?

I for one would be curious to find out.