This is what happens

escape hoi polloi
stay at home and yet stay smart
failed experiment

In a misguided effort to become more pretentious and possibly better read, I got a subscription to Harper's magazine. I just tried to read some of it, and damn. Translated Nazi discussions from a prison camp, a possibly non-fiction dialogue written in the 1940s about a stillbirth (and other terrible, hush-hush things happening at the hands of questionable nuns), a story about a town with a full sewer system ("full" as in overflowing gunk into people's backyards, requiring everyone to have a septic system even though they live in the town-proper), and on and on.

Do people think writing has to be staggeringly depressing to be edifying? Even the funny David Foster Wallace excerpt was about a creepy baby repeatedly described as "fierce-looking."

Am I smarter now? More pretentious? Does the postman think highly of me as he delivers my Harpers? Will my friends be impressed if they see a copy of the magazine scattered across my floor? "Oh, your baby destroys Harpers... mine just demolishes Real Simple."

I'm going to guess the answer to the above questions is an emphatic No.

I'm also going to guess that I'll be sticking to my Entertainment Weekly from now on.

Hoi Polloi unite!