In this issue:

-a thing about egg creams that excited me because I'm reading the New Yorker in New York for once!

-"Grub", by Dana Goodyear, which was about eating bugs and all the delicious things you can do and why people are squeamish but frustrated me because it didn't tell us better ways to get food bugs and, uh, be the change you wanna see;

-"Voicebox 360", by Tom Bissell, about a woman who does videogame voiceovers, which was okay but sort of careery and psychological and didn't tell me more about just voice acting which is really what I was there for although it maybe wasn't the place;

"Leap of faith: The making of a Republican front-runner", by Ryan Lizza, about Michele Bachmann, who I recall seeming a lot crazier back in like 2006 than this article makes her sound. Time to troll the Wonkette archives?

-"Sleeping with the enemy: What happened between the Neanderthals and us?" by Elizabeth Kolbert, about the Neanderthal Genome Project under the direction of Svarte Pääbo. Not only did we sleep with Neanderthals, not only is Neanderthal DNA what separates Europeans and Asians from Africans, but they discovered these other people called Denisovans whose genes exist now in Melanesian peoples and nowhere else, which raises all these enormous questions for our concepts of race and difference;

-"Caǧaloǧlu", by JD McClatchy, a poem in which the sloughing off of filth and the emergence clean merely makes the filth more present a la Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's "In Praise of Shadows", but which mostly made me happy because I was at Caǧaloǧlu too, one time;

-fiction, which I need to learn how not to skip;

-"Shakespeare on Park: Two Royal Shakespeare Company productions", by Hilton Als, who is cranky and does not understand the Middle Ages and their conception of nature and Ecclesiasticus and the pastoral and as a result thinks the play is some kind of Elizabethan romance novel, which is jejune;

-"Is that all there is? Secularism and its discontents", by James Wood, a review of The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now (George Levine, ed.), in which Wood says some I-woulda-thought-obvious things about secularism finding its serenity and not defining itself against and not conceiving loss of God as loss and blah blah;

"The Wagner Identity: A new regime at the Bayreuth Festival", by Alex Ross, which makes Bayreuth sound crazy and cool and makes me happy about small worlds where people care passionately about things that mass consumer culture disesteems, like opera, because the old class divides are dead and the new ones aren't about people--aren't about opera being for toffs--they're about where big capital gets its power from, which is all of us, now and then. ( )