Required Reading

Some great stuff out there.

This Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article from Sundays A1 examines how much companies are profiting by aligning themselves with breast cancer awareness and the Pink Ribbon ad campaign. For example, how much does Motorola actually give to the cause every time someone buys a pink phone?

And if I were half the critic and writer that Slate reporter Byran Curtis is, who wrote this piece about Mitch Albom, then I'd be... Well, I don't know where I'd be, but somewhere like Slate.

Curtis describes Albom as "a peddler of shallow morality tales for the masses." He goes on to call him a "huckster evangelist for the soccer-mom set." I'd love to be able to write eviscerating critiques like that. Hell, I'd settle for thoughtful critiques.

I read Albom's Tuesday's With Morrie when I came out after asking for it for a birthday. The best I could muster on the blank page in the back after I read it was "overrated" and "not actually moving, just manipulative." Mostly, I just thought it sucked.

Every time I clear out my bookshelves I think of tossing ol' Tuesdays into the Goodwill pile, but I get such a charge out of complaining about that book that I've kept it around. The last time my Tall Drink of Water nearly insisted I get rid it - I think he never wanted to be subjected to the Albom tirade again - but alas, it still sits on the shelf, waiting for me to launch into how much I hated it again.

Once, while lampooning his other book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, my coworker Sue said "more like the one ego-maniac you meet in Detroit." It still makes me laugh.

And then there's this article, Pursuing Happiness, from the New Yorker. I just read it this summer, even though it came out in February. (There is a stack of unread New Yorkers taking over my apartment - and my will to live!) But the article is great reading.

Go ahead and write this down: H=S+C+V. It's the secret of happiness according the article. You can buy me a coffee or something as a thanks later.

One thing I wanted to post a link to is a piece Nora Ephron published in the New Yorker this summer called Serial Monogamy, about her love of cook books and her obsession with their authors. I'm not much a cookbook lover, but the piece was so well written and so funny that I came away thinking that Nora is the writer of the family, even though it's her famous ex, Carl Bernstein, who gets all the accolades. (So he helped bring down the Nixon White House, what has he done lately?)

You can read Serial Monogamy if you buy her new book of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck.

Well, I can tell you one thing Carl Bernstein has done lately and that's attend the wedding of a former Enquirer reporter who now works for him. I chatted with her at Jen's wedding, and three weeks later Jen attended her wedding, at which Carl Bernstein was present.

Jen described him as "a crazy dancer," and not in a good way, and also kind of embarrassing, like a crazy uncle.

"If someone would have had a video camera it would have been tempting to post it on YouTube he was that wacky," Jen said.