“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

- Kenneth Boulding

Last week, in one of the most entertaining interviews in Colbert Report history, Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak took everything from the publishing industry to Newt Gingrich to task. The 83-year-old children’s book author saved his harshest words, however, for e-books, loudly declaring:

“F— them, is what I say. I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be. I will be dead, I wont give a s—.”

The Flight From Conversation

From a reader in response to a recent NY Times article, "The flight from conversation":

I had to terminate a friendship because the friend was never "there", even when we had dinner or just casually conversing. She could not stop looking at her iPhone and texting someone NOT present. She had evolved into a person who could not even understand why her behavior was offensive. She was texting even as I walked away! She didn't even know I was GONE.

Good Girl

by Kim Addonizio

Look at you, sitting there being good.
After two years you're still dying for a cigarette.
And not drinking on weekdays, who thought that one up?
Don't you want to run to the corner right now
for a fifth of vodka and have it with cranberry juice
and a nice lemon slice, wouldn't the backyard
that you're so sick of staring out into
look better then, the tidy yard your landlord tends
day and night — the fence with its fresh coat of paint,
the ash-free barbeque, the patio swept clean of small twigs —
don't you want to mess it all up, to roll around
like a dog in his flowerbeds? Aren't you a dog anyway,
always groveling for love and begging to be petted?
You ought to get into the garbage and lick the insides
of the can, the greasy wrappers, the picked-over bones,
you ought to drive your snout into the coffee grounds.
Ah, coffee! Why not gulp some down with four cigarettes
and then blast naked into the streets, and leap on the first
beautiful man you find? The words Ruin me, haven't they
been jailed in your throat for forty years, isn't it time
you set them loose in slutty dresses and torn fishnets
to totter around in five-inch heels and slutty mascara?

Sure it's time. You've rolled over long enough.
Forty, forty-one. At the end of all this
there's one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt.
So get going. Listen: they're howling for you now:
up and down the block your neighbors' dogs
burst into frenzied barking and won't shut up.

If I hadn't known better, I'd guess Bukowski. But I'd be wrong.