​From time to time I have imagined a great password Armageddon or rapture, where all of our secret codes to get into all of our email, social media, and Slack accounts suddenly disappear. Everyone's private conversations are suddenly open to anyone who can suss out the username. It's harder to imagine how we can guess everyone's username, so for the purposes of this nightmare please ignore that part and skip to the chaos: Every off-color joke, every angry behind-the-back shit-talking, every half-formed controversial opinion or even draft email is there for any one on earth to do with it what they wish. Every enemy, every former friend or lover, and every malicious stranger can dig in and find something. 

How long have you been online, and how many accounts do you have? O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, consider Mike Pesca, who once was as liberal and loved as you.

In the first few weeks the cancelations would be constant. Celebrities and politicians and journalists would be lit up by online mobs. Regular Joes and Regular Jos would be swept up too. Apologies asserting that the offender would "do better" and "listen" would be ignored as the DM raiders moved on to their next target, their next scalp. 

The only thing more maddening than a recipe that forces you to read someone's life story before you get to the ingredients is a recipe that lacks someone's life story. My life story is at the end of this recipe.

​Crunchy Fried Chicken Deanne
 
Ingredients:
 
8 whole (uncut) chicken wings
1 tbsp kosher salt
1.5 cups buttermilk
1 cup flour
3 eggs with a few tbsp water
2 cups panko crumbs
2 tsp seasoned salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp ground thyme
Whatever other spices you like, but don't go bonkers
24 ounces canola oil
1/4 cup bacon grease 
 
Hot honey (optional)
1/2 cup honey
Red Pepper Flakes
Hot sauce
 
Instructions:
​
​1. Put tbsp kosher salt in a gallon size ziplock that does not leak. Don't get capital-Z Ziplocks because they are a disgrace and will definitely leak. Hefty brand freezer bags are excellent and do not leak or burst. Put saltbag in your backpack and ride your bike into work. (DO NOT ride an e-bike. I mean fuck-off with that.)

[Author's note: I wrote this Thursday night and thus this says "today" about an article published on Thursday and "yesterday" for something posted Wednesday and I refuse to edit that shit out.]



Bigshot hard-drivin' lawyer Lara Bazelon has a love story to tell, sort of:

"There was no emotional or physical abuse in our home. There was no absence of love. I was in love with my husband when we got divorced. Part of me is in love with him still. I suspect that will always be the case. Even now, after everything, when he walks into the room my stomach drops the same way it does before the roller coaster comes down. I divorced my husband not because I didn’t love him. I divorced him because I loved myself more."

I'm not sure that is not how romantic love or roller coasters work, but if it is a good thing when stomach-dropping persists well into a relationship, then I would recommend she and her man stick together. Despite what you might guess, that paragraph is not from a letter to the CIA psyops program known as Slate's Dear Prudence column, but from Bazelon's essay "Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love" featured in today's New York Times Opinion section. Bazelon is a criminal defense lawyer on the Clarence Darrow, crusader-for-the-little-guy tip. The terse Times bio also says she is "a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and the author of the forthcoming book 'Ambitious Like A Mother.'" Get it? That's short for "like a motherfucker." Hahaha.  One assumes this is an excerpt.

In his essay "Why I Write," George Orwell observed that, "looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally." I have read a lot of Orwell and I have never come across a purple passage, but I will take his word for it. However, I am reluctant to agree with him that good writing necessitates a political purpose because it is in 2021 and I am exhausted. Politics is ubiquitous and obnoxious. Nary a coffee shop in America is free of a political slogan scrawled in chalk next to the single-origin prices. It is tedious, exhausting, and endlessly divisive. Literature without political purpose seems like a relief to me.  

In the same essay Orwell has an answer for my complaint. "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." Fair enough, but also exhausting. We have many, many writers today eager to stress that point. I mean, God forbid you write about the moon or a flower.

Despite my resistance to these claims, Orwell is probably right. The political purpose that is nearly always present in his books and essays gives his work moral force, but it does not make his views correct, nor is it the aspect that makes his writing stand out from the other sincere and humane political tracts of his time. Before all else, Orwell is a fantastic stylist. He has a casual, almost conversational tone that belies a confidence and an authority that nearly no writer can match. He is concise, direct, but never dull. To take one example of his many talents, he is one of the finest lead writers in English. Here are a handful of classic opening lines: