I saw the original Ghostbusters in the eighties and liked it as much as you’d expect a seven-year-old to like it. I saw the second one in the theaters and liked it, too. I was also genuinely spooked by some of it. Those movies’ visual effects always overachieved.

“Cocaine in the writer’s room”

ACT A FOOL!

Now That’s What I Call a Medallion

That dad sweater is as effective as any prophylactic. 

Goosebumps? Is that what he told you? Christ, girl, you’re an idiot. That’s herpes. Go check if the free clinic’s open on Saturday mornings.

There are people out there that will tell you that it’s the very looseness of the British constitution that has made British governance relatively stable and more-or-less competent, until recently. A written constitution with spelled-out powers tends to encourage Americans — the argument goes — to favor the expansion…

Hannah Arendt wrote that, to paraphrase, an incredible credulity married to bottomless cynicism was typical of Nazi die-hards. Just a thought.

The catastrophic Shasta Cola body hair hecatomb of ‘89: I was there!

You know, it just occurred that we could have a discussion about the Michael Jackson Pepsi Hair Incident and the Clarence Thomas Coke Hair Incident.

I became aware of pop music right after Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” changed the world for everyone. Precisely nobody I knew back then cared one whit about Michael Jackson, even the relatively few friends I had who liked music made by black people. So when you say “Michael Jackson fans” I usually…

From a political perspective, “The Great Gatsby” is probably the safest choice. I think that it’s still a required read in a lot of high schools. “Catch-22" can be seen as subversive and “The Grapes of Wrath” is too socialist/left-leaning. “The Sound and the Fury” is a classic, but it involves a lot of weird incest…

Fair enough, really. But we may have update the Shakespeare response. I mean, he’s genuinely difficult for moderns to read. Perhaps, I don’t know, Toni Morrison? Ernest Hemingway? Who’s the most reliably emblematic author today?

That was made to be a show that adults could watch, too, though. 

I mean, I think this is a good point, in theory, but you’ve used lousy examples. It’s one thing to find interesting things to talk about in C.S. Lewis’s books, for example. I can imagine an adult getting something valuable out of those. But I’m not sure that too many psychologically normal adults would get too much…

You obviously haven’t checked out real estate prices in Brooklyn lately. 

I’m guessing you attended five or six as the groom. 

Sort of playing the devil’s advocate here, but there might be enough in Shakespeare to keep you going for a whole human lifetime. That shit runs deep. The college professor I did Shakespeare told us, “it’s amazing what you miss the first fifteen times you read it.” Harry Potter, per Margolyes and per me, might just…

Well, that was decades ago! How did the marriage turn out?

You can recognize that people have the right to do something while at the same time respecting them a little less for it. These things are not mutually exclusive. She’s not saying that it should be illegal to sell a Harry Potter book to a thirty-five-year-old.