A List of Interesting Stories I’ve Read Recently

• “The worst date I’ve ever seen was a blind date — halfway through, the guy asked to be escorted out the back door and not to tell his date. We got her a couple of drinks. She took it pretty well.” [El Rey hostess Melissa Calcagni, Hostess of the Year, Esquire]

• Spokesman Tom Angell told me today that there’s no downside to a big sports fest around Election Day. “Research shows that when voters are excited, turnout increases,” he said. “And what could be more exciting for Bay Area sports fans than two huge victories in one week: bringing home a World Series championship and a win on Prop 19?” [Mother Jones]

• Disgust does more than just keep us away from poisonous substances. It also exerts a powerful and idiosyncratic influence on judgment. People who are feeling disgust become harsher in their judgments of moral offenses and offenders. [NY Times]

• “I think people don’t quite understand how much it requires to put your head above the parapet,” Prince Charles says. “It’s no fun having your head shot off all the time. But I just feel deeply … I know perfectly well this book is going to bring all of my critics out of their lairs. It’s probably just as well…” [Vanity Fair]

• The situation has repeatedly been called Kafkaesque, reflecting, perhaps, the strangeness of the idea that Kafka can be anyone’s private property. Isn’t that what Brod demonstrated, when he disregarded Kafka’s last testament: that Kafka’s works weren’t even Kafka’s private property but, rather, belonged to humanity? [New York Times Magazine]

• This section of Kangerdlugssuaq had vanished in only 10 months — a pace most scientists had thought impossible. Perhaps the ice sheets weren’t battleships, massive and inert, but catamarans, nimble, bending to the wind. The question now was, how fast were the glaciers moving? [Rolling Stone]

• Warm and effusive in public, indifferent or angry in private: this is the pattern of Palin’s behavior toward the people who make her life possible. A onetime gubernatorial aide to Palin says, “The people who have worked for her—they’re broken, used, stepped on, down in the dust.” [Vanity Fair]

• Suicide chat rooms can save lives. The very act of logging on to a site like alt.suicide.methods (ASM) or alt.suicide.holiday (ASH) offers a potentially suicidal person the chance of finding support, redemption, or relief from the loneliness that led him there in the first place. Or logging on could be the first step a suicidal person takes to find the expertise, the courage, even the companionship, to go through with it. These chat rooms can provide a lifeline, or they can amount to a death sentence. It all depends on who’s online and what they’re doing there. [GQ]

• “What gutted me the most was that it was from some major studio,” he said. “I wouldn’t have minded if it had been some kids with a camera who had gone off and rewritten the rule book on how you make movies.” [NY Times]

• She wore that ponytail the first time most people ever saw her — on her television show, Friday Night Lights, season one, episode one. She was the high school cheerleader, kissing the quarterback in the driveway. That was four years ago, when she was twenty-six in real life and working as a scrub nurse — C-sections, amputations, craniotomies (a bone flap is temporarily removed from the skull to access the brain), gunshot wounds, organ harvests, boob jobs, tummy tucks — before getting the call that she’d been picked for a principal role in a new network drama. [Esquire]