History's Most Ideal Beards

Content series are produced in partnership with our sponsors. This edition of "Bearded Idealism" is brought to you by Philips Norelco.

Anyone who considers growing a beard weighs the same set of pros and cons. Assuming you're already confident in your ability to muster respectable whiskers'and you may not be, as one sad sack relates'your immediate concern is probably skin irritation. Beards itch. They itch you, and they'll itch anyone you're close to. They can even irk casual observers. Try watching Giant's relief pitcher Brian Wilson midgame. The fake beards donned by fans meant to display support for Wilson's Black Beard Revival are an affront to his dedication. In the midst of summer, hurling 100 mph fastballs, that thing probably feels like a bird's nest made of fiber insulation. But it doesn't matter whether you're a Major League baseball star or just a major fan of Sean Connery's chin frost in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: facial hair prickles, and it ought to. Trying to minimize irritation by refusing to grow out your peach fuzz is a bit like doing a polar bear plunge in a wetsuit. It misses the point.

A full beard can be a sign of commitment. Indeed, many of history's most memorable beards were rough, hot, and all-around inconvenient. Take Hemingway. Every July, heavyset men with salty beards descend upon Key West to participate in the annual Hemingway Day Festival's lookalike contest. Yet Hemingway never rocked the full beard during his stay in Florida: the whitewashed mane for which he is now famous was a fixture of his time in Cuba. As if Key West weren't muggy enough, Hemingway waited to grow the thing out until he was ninety miles closer to the equator. You better believe that thing chafed. And it was worth it, too. Why else would otherwise sane middle aged men throw on turtlenecks in July, abstain from shaving, and pack themselves into a place called Sloppy Joe's Bar to be judged based on their resemblance to Papa? Let us take a look at some of history's most irritating and famously full beards.

Socrates
He may not have left us any instructions in writing, but there are lessons to be learned from the way he groomed his face. At least his pupils, and their subsequent pupils, seemed to think so. Both Plato and Aristotle followed Socrates's lead and grew billowing beards of their own. Socrates introduced the beard as an indispensible part of Western society's conceptualization of the sagacious philosopher. Even though his successors claimed he refused to flee Athens before his execution for ethical reasons, we prefer to believe that Socrates knew a life on the lam would require shaving his most distinguishing feature, and chose death instead.

Grigori Rasputin
Those wild eyes were God-given, but pairing them with an equally untamable beard was pure genius. In doing so, Rasputin set the style for generations of heartthrob zealots to come (see Guevara, Che). And, while a thick beard is far from uncommon in frigid Russia, Rasputin still manages to make it look risky.

ZZ Top
It's been said a million times, but these guys deserve another round of applause for all they've done on behalf of overkeen beards in pop culture. That is, except for drummer Frank Beard, who, despite his name and occupation, inexplicably chooses to go mustache-only.

Brigham Young
Whereas some beard wearers seek new converts, Brigham Young's mutton-chop and goatee column combo is not to be repeated. Literally. Scruff is strictly forbidden at the university that bears his name (unless you get a special 'Beard Card') and, in modern times, it's been something of an unspoken rule that Mormon prophets must be clean-shaven. Ensuring he would never be bested, Young birthed a religion with mixed feelings about facial hair.

General Ambrose Burnside
This guy was responsible for not one, but two, of the North's worst defeats during the Civil War, yet he's remembered for inventing sideburns. Now there's a beard.

Frederick Barbarossa
In our shared, cultural consciousness, there exists a stocky guy with a bushy, strawberry-colored beard. How'd he get there? Frederick Barbarossa, the man whose last name actually means 'red beard,' was the original. Indeed, from Yukon Kornelius and Action Bronson to the less portly Conan O'Brien, beards look good on redheads. Improbably, Emperor Barbarossa's lasting crusade may not have been his invasion of the Germanic states in the late 1100s but in the world of men's fashion.

Kimbo Slice
Most modern militaries agree that facial hair interferes with soldiers' duties, but street fighter turned professional boxer Kimbo Slice feels differently. Almost entirely bald, Slice lets his beard speak for itself, wearing it like war paint to intimidate his enemies in the ring. Unkempt and tangled, it recalls a primordial age in which warriors were encouraged to look as fearsome as they behaved.

This content was created for our sponsor Philips Norelco.

Priorities Bad

"Terrifyingly, much of the public and the press does actually care more about fancy horseback riding and teen pot use than secretive protocol for unchecked killing and legal precedents that radically erode civil liberties."

Exercise Will Kill You

'There are a lot of people out there looking for any excuse not to exercise. This might be an excuse for them to say, 'Oh, I must be one of those 10 percent.''
'William Haskell, emeritus professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, expresses concern about a series of studies which show that rigorous exercise actually harms the health of about 10 percent of people who attempt it. Are you part of the 10 percent? Almost certainly. So relax, it's good for you.

Photo by Slava Gerj, via Shutterstock

First The Robots Will Carve Chickens...

Yes, let's teach robots to debone chickens. That is certainly not a skill they could transfer to anything more worrisome.

Line Dancers More Likely To Kill You

'We are doing things we wouldn't otherwise do, because we feel an emotional connection to our team.'
'Makes sense. Scott Wiltermuth of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business explains a recent study's finding that acting in unison makes people more aggressive and destructive. This explains the Nazis, soccer hooliganism and the violence associated with doing the Hokey Pokey.

Québec! What Is Going On Up There?

1. Happy mobs are all alike; every unhappy mob is unhappy in its own way. This has been lost on a lot of journalists in the last few weeks as many Québécois¹ have poured into the streets, banging casserole dishes and getting beaten up and arrested for the perceived threat they pose. Every American commentary I find on it is eager to relate this to Occupy Wall Street, conveniently excusing itself from learning about the culture of the place. Well, agitprop's always been a lot quicker to write than history, I suppose, and maybe that is most of all true about a place like Québec, where people sing the national song'not 'Oh Canada!' of course, but a little ditty called 'Gens du pays' (Men of the country)'along with "Happy Birthday" on your blessed day. The Québécois readily lend themselves to mythologizing, which can be infectious to day-travellers. That is, until the visitors realize that they are absolutely not included in it.

I'm all in favor of drumming up support for the protesters'tonight they've called for a 'Casseroles Night in Canada' that could be a lot of fun. But maybe you're not quite sure what they're banging on about (heh) beyond some vague notion that it's about tuition fees. (No, having read Infinite Jest won't help you out on this, or with Québec more generally.) And to be clear, it's not only Americans who are unsure what this is about. Most English Canadians don't know, either. Too often discussion of Québec in English Canada is either wholly abstract or reasoned largely from the first principle of that totally rude Montréal waitress who didn't accept your order in garbled French, that one time. Let's see if we can do better.

2. Conveniently, pop culture has recently blessed us with ahistorical nonsense about la belle province: If you watch "Mad Men" you've been introduced to their ostensible Québécoise, Megan Calvet. For all the show's vaunted claims to authenticity this story thread is, I'm not really sorry to say, bullshit. Nevermind that the name Megan is virtually unpronounceable by a Québécois tongue, and nevermind that the actors portraying her parents did at best middling approximations of the French Canadian accent. (One was Belgian; the other, 'French French,' as you'll sometimes hear anglophones put it.) The period is all wrong, because "Mad Men" right now is in 1966, and in 1966 pretty young francophone girls from Québec were not perfectly bilingual liberated swingers playing sexy songs in go-go boots. In 1966 what is called Québec's Quiet Revolution had just gotten underway and French Canadians were not singing "Zoobeezoobeeeezoo" to each other in go-go boots to pass the time. They were too busy digging themselves out of a cultural and economic hole.

Let's back up a moment to explain why a revolution was even needed: before 1960, the province was basically run by the Catholic Church. Since the mid-30s, the Catholic anti-communist autocrat Maurice Duplessis'also known as le chef or 'The Boss,' a title he embraced'had ruled with a few years' interruption. He was a nationalist, an admirer of Franco in Spain and, worst of all, quite 'religious.' One of his more amazing schemes was to save money by having orphans'who at the time were largely the children of unwed mothers'declared insane. This allowed Duplessis to get them off his tab; orphanages were a provincial funding responsibility but the feds covered the psychiatric hospitals. As a special bonus prize this put these children directly in the hands of the Catholic Church, as they often ran the orphanages and psychiatric institutions. I leave the rest to your imaginations.

By the end, even the bishops themselves were angry with him, but Duplessis clung to his office until the day he died in 1959. Today to speak of him in Québec (or even elsewhere in Canada) is to speak of the devil, unless you are Conrad Black, who wrote a simpering biography of Duplessis in the 1970s, the basic thesis of which was that Duplessis was totally amazing and misunderstood. Even today he's still writing about Duplessis era's 'a unique blend of traditional Quebec faith-based spiritually inspired self-help, with what would 30 years later be called supply-side industrialization,' because he is Conrad Black and he has not even the tiniest pretense of shame.

Duplessis' successor was a man named Jean Lesage. He inherited a deeply unhappy populace, obviously, and what was worse, one that had neither education nor money. Francophones were about 80% of Québec's population but few of them finished high school and fewer owned businesses. Anglophones were on the whole richer and better educated. Lesage looked around and thought: well, I might not be able to force anglophones to literally write a check to the francophone population, but I can (a) increase taxes and (b) use that money to build schools and employ much of the populace. This, along with a few other schemes, became what Québec knew as its 'projet de société.'

As the all-encompassing worldview of the Catholic Church was replaced by an all-encompassing secular and egalitarian political vision of an egalitarian society, one ruled by the people for the people, which somewhat naturally meant francophones. Anglophone Québec may quibble with this and yell about the various indignities they have suffered at the hands of francophones'and they always, always bring up the FLQ crisis²'but let's face it: it's not weird that a place where 80 percent of the populace speaks one language is consequently dominated by it. And so, for sheer demographic reasons, linguistic nationalism and an active, interventionist government became deeply entwined in the national consciousness. Policy objectives like cheap daycare and generous parental leave became identity markers. As did, by the way, tuition freezes, the first of which lasted from 1968 all the way to 1990. Low student tuition is a way of life.

3. When I arrived in Montréal some 14 years ago to attend university, I came as the daughter of two people born and raised in Québec. My father's family never spoke a word of French, living in a small anglophone hamlet near Ottawa. My mother's situation was more complicated, and easier than explaining it is pointing out that she and her sister have effectively lived linguistically different lives, my aunt (largely) francophone and my mother (near-entirely) anglophone. I spent summers and weekends in Québec visiting family. But I wasn't born there myself, my dad having joined the Canadian Air Force and left several years before I came around. So I was greeted as an interloper.

The specific financial consequence of that was a higher tuition rate than my Québec-belonging peers. Back then they were charged'brace yourselves'$1,668 per annum to attend university. I, meanwhile, was charged the princely sum of about $2,800. For Americans this may not sound all that surprising; out-of-state tuition at public colleges has a long history here. But when this tiered system was introduced back in 1997, it was the first time any province had done it. It's sometimes defended as a decision made because Québec taxpayers pay for those universities, but the numerous exemptions''French French' students enjoy the benefit of a bilateral agreement allowing them to pay in-province tuition, for example, as do students studying French or Québec studies'give the lie to that, a little.³ So scandal and outrage erupted in what's called the 'Rest of Canada.' It was a backhanded slap, and we knew it. And, to an extent, deserved it, as we shall see.

See, the introduction of what we called 'differential tuition' was one of many gestures Québec made in the mid-90s to indicate that the 'projet de société' was still alive. In 1995, we had a little thing called a 'referendum' on the question of Québec's independence. The sovereignists (the polite word for Québec nationalism, since what they seek is sovereignty) lost by just over half a point, was of course another. It brought to a head a long-simmering conflict over Québec's membership in whatever Canadian project might be said to exist. Now, Canadians are not particularly nationalistic, as far as investment beyond sewing that flag to your Mountain Equipment Co-op backpack goes, but the one symbol of a coherent country we have is (naturally) our constitution. Of course for a long time our Constitution was an Act of British Parliament and still is, though we do our level best not to think too hard about that. Pierre Trudeau led what we call the effort to 'patriate' our Constitution back in 1982. Trudeau dreamed of adding a bill of rights to the Constitution, a move not actually all that popular among the premiers (think 'governors') of the time, who appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Court ruled that Trudeau only needed the support of a 'substantial' number of provinces to achieve his ends, and he managed to get the premiers to agree, sans one: René Lévesque, then-premier of Québec, who was cut out of last minute negotiations.

Québec has never, as a result, ratified the Constitution, and that goes for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms too. The day Queen Elizabeth came to Canada to sign it Lévesque flew the Québec flag at half-mast; for years afterwards, the Québec legislature added, to every single one of its bills, a so-called 'notwithstanding' clause. A 'notwithstanding' clause allows legislatures to get out from under certain Charter rights, including freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, whenever necessary. It's rarely used but, when it is, it is magnificently controversial, as it should be. One of its most famous uses is in Québec's Charter of the French Language, which decrees among other things that signs must be in French, and either contain no English at all or, in an accommodation of our imperfect world, English typeset half as big as the French. This gave rise to an immortal cartoon, sadly not available online, of a man sitting behind a desk adorned with a sign that said 'FRENCH' in huge letters. Below it, in tiny ones: 'fries.'

4. It was the notwithstanding clause that I thought of first when I heard of Loi 78 ('Bill 78'), which was introduced a few weeks ago in response to the protests. The bill is a sort of ersatz War Measures Act. It bans demonstrations on campus, forces anyone organizing a gathering of more than ten people to inform the police of where and when they will arrive, and gives student associations the obligation to 'induce' its members to comply with the law. In other words, it's a flagrant violation of the freedom to assemble, so much so that a bunch of lawyers actually got into their robes to protest the damn thing. (Now the government is threatening to prosecute one of the organizers, who works for the Québec equivalent of the DMV.)

In short, the whole idea of Bill 78 was so blatantly illegal I assumed it must contain a notwithstanding clause; that's the only way the law would stand up in court. But it doesn't, which, counterintuitively, tells you a lot about what's at stake here. If Bill 78 did opt out of the civil rights regime by invoking the notwithstanding clause it could have styled itself as just another stand Québec was taking against the incursion of Canadian federalism. But it didn't'and so set itself up as something different. Something that, instead of galvanizing everyone to fight the outside Canadian enemy, it's set Québec up against itself in a way guaranteed to raise the specter of sovereignty, again.

The bill's association with anti-sovereignty movements is more than symbolic. Jean Charest, the current premier of Québec who signed it, also happens to have made a name for himself as one of only two Progressive Conservative members of federal Parliament who survived the post-Mulroney (remember that horse's ass of a person, who thought Ronald Reagan was the second coming?) bloodbath. Charest then achieved the dubious distinction of taking over as head of the Tories and became known as 'Captain Canada' (oh god, so embarrassing but I seem to remember it involved a flag cape) during his vice-chairmanship of the 1995 referendum campaign for the 'No' side. As is the custom in Canada for political megalomaniacs of middling talent, once Charest realized he'd never be Prime Minister, he jumped ship for a provincial party of a different name but better fortune. Today he leads the Québec Liberals, and he's been the premier since 2003.

At the time we all thought: hooray! No more Parti Québécois, which had helmed the province for the eight years before, with their entertaining but ultimately unhelpful penchant for doddering-grandpapa encomia to 'white race' reproduction and public drunkenness. We thought it would mean less focus on sovereignty, which as Québec got richer in the late 90s and early aughts became less attractive, shopping being more fun generally than political activity. We thought it would mean more time to sort out Québec's social issues. And Charest, despite his political bed-hopping, still had the aura of a star'or at least, someone new.

Naturally, though, because it seems only complete knobs go into politics these days (that's a cross-cultural judgment based on international statistical evidence I have compiled over many years of observation and eyerolling), he squandered his chances. Charest has been re-elected twice, but each time his popularity numbers have quickly fallen off. The reasons are too intricate to go into here, but suffice to say he's been the beneficiary of a leadership vacuum in the Parti Québécois rather than any excess personal charisma or skill. He tends to make election promises he doesn't keep, or are so impractical he eventually has to reverse himself, and now faces a giant corruption probe related to the province's transparently corrupt construction industry. (I say transparent because, for example, the entire month of August is known as the 'Construction holiday' in Québec, and almost no one works then and no one says a word. Seriously.)

The introduction of Loi 78 is his most recent act of political suicide, and it will likely be his last because, whatever the Québécois might have thought of the student strike, few are charmed by an attempt to keep them from complaining loudly about the government. Between Charest's total mismanagement of the protests, the bill itself, and the corruption probe, it's hard to imagine anyone thinking this guy should be kept in charge. Which means his eye will probably swivel those 180 degrees back to federal politics. And the Parti Québécois, currently the only viable alternative, will be back atop the heap.

But hey: let's not dwell on that. There are greater things at stake.

5. So, yes, all the hullabaloo about tuition is pretty much exactly that. The Québec student does, now, pay a little more than they did when I started at McGill lo those many moons ago, though the number'$2,492'will not inspire much more sympathy among Americans. Though it's true the increase projected will raise tuition by about 75%, it is to be stretched out over 7 years. That means your average student will pay an extra $254 per year, to a high end of $3,793.⁴ If this sounds utterly reasonable to you, rest assured it also does to most Québécois. Support for a tuition freeze, one of the protesters' demands, is routinely reported to be somewhere in the low teens.

That's the real change, by the way, the one more subtle and worrisome. It's the sudden pervasiveness of the idea'widely held both within and outside Québec'that these students are whiners and freeloaders who have been so destructive and difficult that they don't even deserve to win this fight. The Rest of Canada long ago drifted into this perspective, and while there's still a lot of preening about how much cheaper education and health care are than in the States, those attitudes are usually just window dressing to a general trend of budget cuts and complacency. Québec has long been a holdout, but that era's over. Which makes the students indisputedly right about one thing: the problem with 'reforms' like these is that they constitute an abandonment of that old saw, the 'projet de société.'

Maybe you have to have lived in Québec to understand why this is such a tragedy. In certain superficial ways, government interventionism has a flair for the absurd. I get a lot of mileage in American bars filling people in on some of Québec's funnier rules. Yes, it's true that a woman is actually prohibited from changing her last name upon marriage. And yes, it's true that there's an office that approves baby names. And yeah, through a byzantine legislative quirk, your children will not be able to attend English schools unless you did.

But these are only lightly annoying jurisdictional quirks. I assure you that the need to know a second language becomes rather unobjectionable if the trade-off is free access to health care and cheap education. (And actually, I would daringly suggest that knowing a second language can be valuable and enjoyable!) I don't know what a Québec without those things will look like, and I wish I wasn't about to find out. If I could I'd bang a pot for you tonight, la patrie, but my neighbours here in New York have children and a seriously annoying little yappy dog. I'll have to make do with a salute to the moon and a dinner of pizza-ghetti. I hope you'll understand.

¹ Prophylactic note to pedantic anglophones: Yes. I put an accent aigu on Québec place names where warranted. My reason's actually terribly simple: they are proper names. Spelling someone's proper name is a sign of respect. That said, I've always understood the wide rejection of it elsewhere in Canada as keyboard-induced laziness. (Alt-130, people! There, I have solved the problem.)
² I've resisted going into the FLQ crisis there because it came out of the confluence of a unique set of circumstances that I don't think are reproduced here. Your mileage may vary on that, but you'd be wrong.
³ Another wrinkle is the existence of a terribly complicated funding system in Canada known as 'transfer payments,' in which the federal governments allocates funds to so-called 'have-not' provinces. I am loath to get into this because as you can imagine there are several layers of bad feelings involved. But yes, Québec traditionally has been a 'have-not' province and received money from the others to pay for its social programs, is the short version.
⁴ By the by, all of this has virtually no bearing on out-of-province tuition, which has been steadily rising over the years, to the 2011-2012 level of $6,836.

Previously: Canada! How Does It Work?

Michelle Dean writes in a lot of places, now. Follow her on Twitter. Top photo by L'oeil_ ' Lost; photo of Charest by Le Chibouki (beaucoup moins) frustré.

Salt Gimmicky, Disgusting

"A range of salts said to have been collected from human tears has gone on sale in London. Hoxton Street Monster Supplies says the salts come from crying humans experiencing a range of emotions. The £7 range includes salts harvested from tears of sorrow, tears shed while sneezing, tears shed while chopping onions, tears of laughter, and tears of anger."

Sulzberger Lady-Catfight Scenario Not a Thing

Did Arthur Sulzberger's hot ladyfriend drive out the CEO of the New York Times? No, she did not. Although "It was a scenario that appealed to those relish­ing a catfight between 'Arthur's women,'" so let's talk about it anyway. :(

Subject Lines of Obama Campaign Emails That Sound Like a Stalker Wrote Them

"Five years ago, today"

"Do you still live in Illinois?"

"Something I'd like to ask you"

"Join me for dinner?"

"Me again"

"What's stopping you, right now?"

"Sometime soon, can we meet for dinner?" 

"You must be at least a little curious"

"I'm not shy"

"Guess who"

"Last chance at dinner"

"This is not a joke"

"It doesn't need to be this way"

"Wow"

"It's officially over"

"(I tried.)"

Julie Beck hopes she won't find the Obama campaign standing in her closet with a knife after this.

Bot Catalog

We're both busy and time is important so here is a breakdown. You might very well be a person who has forgotten what you are supposed to be doing. Living with THE FEAR that your bones could shatter like glass at any moment. You woke up on a Saturday and came to the sudden realization that you were all alone. Warming up to the concept of Time. We live in our own Time cages. Where does all the time go? Your life used to be different. It had a different texture, a different shape. Now it's something else. Looking back, I realize that it wasn't the tree houses that made me happy.

They call this growing up, or something similar to it.

Late that night, an old friend calls in. You don't really remember this person, but the sea was not alive, then. The Filipino (at least I think they are Filipino, and no I will not apologize for this) spins out the slow and dreamy hula harmonies. Okay, sometimes being tolerant can really backfire. So off I go, I went ahead and wrote it. When I finished it, I needed a test. He was the perfect subject (he agreed to this).

I'm just trying to tell a story.

Learn From My Agony! Picture things that never even happened, like the time you snuck some frosting onto your lover's nose and they had no idea it was there so they just stood around looking helpless and boy that thing that never happened was so cute, wasn't it? USE MIND CONTROL ON YOURSELF AND OTHERS. WHAT'S BETTER THAN THAT? HYPNOTIZE THOSE AROUND. Ask if you can transplant my eyebrows to your face, and tell me once again that you are not drunk. Dread probability.

I try to keep unfair judgements to a minimum, although none of my judgements are unfair. "Certain" people seem to be running comfortably all the time and they run with their friends and all of them seem very comfortable running. Baking isn't much fun either, when the person you're baking for will take this thing you've spent countless minutes, hours creating, this thing you wanted to perfect, this thing you loved; they will take it and destroy it in seconds and have no idea how much time, how much of yourself you had to sacrifice just for it to exist. In fact is there anything more distressing than that little pat on the back that says, Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn't read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion?

I guess I've had a passion for the past.

The Internet as a source of culture and expression has seemingly reached equilibrium in a state in which a select few create, while everyone else curates. This belief has arisen from long observation of the facts of life. But this shit is getting complicated. FIRE SKY BAR CHUCKLE SKY BUNNY BAR SKY CHARMER SKY DIAMOND DOLL SKY SKY SKY SKY SKY SKY SKY SKY SKY SKY SKY, which is how I ended up in Korea, but that's another story.

There are plenty of skinny guys nailing the golf ball further than you. It is likely that I am overstating things. Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you, but nobody promised this would be easy. THERE IS NO. SUCH THING AS EASY. Again, that post-post-feminism rearing its ugly head.

YOU are such a catch that they would be foolish to pass you up. You finger bang a girl on your bed one day and it's so boring she tells you about being forced to totally request an 'N Sync song so she could get on TV. You deserve to look and feel beautiful, because you are! I used these words. You played the game like everyone asked you to and still managed get to this place of complete and utter loneliness and alienation. Your life is meant to be filled with joy and purpose! I've already gone on longer than I intended. Can you tell I'm a little passionate? You were asleep and now you're awake but it's too late. Are you rightly afraid of the consequences and the pains of a medical intervention? Do you want to look young and fresh? What cat gif, you can almost hear them saying, defines me as a person? What is modern?

Some of us even like happy endings, whether they happen in real life or not. The end is always in doubt until the finale. This novel is a sequel.

I've always had a thing with last words: Funny Face Carrot Salad.

PS: Your magazine is really heteronormative.

Sunny Biswas lives in Austin. He writes here. Photo by readephotography.

Tales from the 'Late Night with Conan O'Brien' Writers Room

The Paley Center for Media, which has locations in both New York and LA, dedicates itself to the preservation of television and radio history. Inside their vast archives of more than 120,000 television shows, commercials, and radio programs, there are thousands of important and funny programs waiting to be rediscovered by comedy nerds like you and me. Each week, this column will highlight a new gem waiting for you at the Paley Library to quietly laugh at. (Seriously, it's a library, so keep it down.)

The nice thing about the subject of today's article is that I don't have to start off with a bunch of context or explain to you why this particular show was important to comedy. If you're on this website, then you probably already know that Late Night with Conan O'Brien was one of the funniest shows to grace television, and that it's illustrious writers room has brought us so much great stuff over the years, beyond just Conan's show. From Louie to Delocated to Mr. Show, some of the finest comedy writers sat in a room together making each other laugh (while getting picked on by their boss, Conan O'Brien. More on that later.).

On November 8th, 2008, The Paley Center got together six of the writers from the then current writing staff of Late Night, along with author Sarah Vowell to serve as moderator. On the panel that night was Dan Cronin (also a stand-up comic, who has continued on with Conan to The Tonight Show, and Conan on TBS), Berkley Johnson (now a writer on The New Girl), Brian McCann (who on Late Night played Preperation Harry, Fed-Ex Pope, and many others), Matt O'Brien (who stayed on with the move to LA and TBS), Brian Stack (who you might recognize as Frankenstein on Late Night, or Artie Kendall the crooning, racist ghost, or The Interrupter, or many others), Andrew Weinberg (co-creator of Eagleheart) and Mike Sweeney (head writer on Late Night, The Tonight Show, and Conan). Ms. Vowell interjects here and there, but for the most part just lets the writers run the show asking just a handful of questions. What follows is a collection of my favorite anecdotes from behind the scenes at Late Night.

Sarah starts the night by asking about the writers' failures. Here we learn about the sketches that either bombed on stage or bombed so hard they were cut out of the show. This includes such characters as 'They Guy With His Diddle Doobie Douche Machine' who would push a button that would play a recording of a someone saying 'diddle,' 'doobie,' or 'douche' to match up with photos of Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg, and George W. Bush. Or the retired office Tom Brokaw Impersonator, who, upon the retirement of Tom Brokaw from NBC, was hoisted up into the rafters of the Late Night set, only to dangle there as he watched Conan and the head writer deliberate for 15 minutes on cutting the bit from the show. Or my personal favorite aborted character mentioned in the discussion, Dan Danna: They Guy Whose Never Heard of Bandanas. Brian Stack talks about Louis C.K. writing a fake ad for the show's 'Actual Items' segment, in which an ad for Old Coins had the tagline: 'Coins so old you can buy slaves with them.' Conan resisted the bit until Louis C.K. called him a 'baby.' That night, without prompting, Conan was booed by the audience.

The writers talk a lot about what would happen if you were the one that wrote the thing that bombed. From the sounds of it, their boss really liked to tease his writers. Sweeney says that during the show if a particular bit died on stage, Conan would like to make eye contact with that writer and then remind them about it several times the next day. On the one hand, if a writer truly believed in an idea, Conan was open to them, and if their passion was strong enough, would put it on the air. On the other hand, if it bombed' well, Sweeney doesn't say Conan would root against those particular pieces, but he does imitate the host rubbing his hands together maniacally like a movie serial villain who has just tied a woman to the train tracks.

According to the writers, though, the best thing about Conan is the fact that he was actually around the office. He was a presence there and would give feedback, listen to ideas and 'come around with the guitar and sing songs about your weaknesses.' Brian Stack talks about Conan's proclivity for generating metaphors for his staff that were perfectly insightful. For example, on a night where Brian was feeling nervous, Conan entered and asked him, 'Stack, you know what you are? You're one of those playwrights from the 1930s pacing around in his tuxedo, waiting for the morning papers to arrive.' Or the way that he would describe the look of another writer, Kevin Dorff, who had a classical Irish tough guy look, 'Dorff, what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be off throwing cabbages at Lincoln's inaugural train?'

The writers also came ready to dish about some of the many celebrities that have taken part in the show's bits over the years. For example, the 'Celebrity Secrets' bit, in which a celebrity sits in an interrogation room set, reading joke 'confessions' about their lives, always began with the celebrity pouring themselves a glass of water. Donald Trump decided to pour some water in his glass, then pour the rest of the pitcher on to the desk before proclaiming, 'you didn't think of that, did ya? I thought that was very funny. You gonna use that or not?' While doing the same bit, Gene Simmons read through the list of jokes and vetoed the majority of them because they had the names of other celebrities in them. 'These people in the jokes can mention me, Gene Simmons, as many times as they want, but I'm not going to say their names. No free rides.'

While some of the faces have changed over the years, clearly life in the Late Night writers room was entertaining to say the least. While things do get a little awkward for present day viewers when the writers discuss what they think will make things different when Conan moves to the Tonight Show at 11:30, The entire panel is an entertaining behind the scenes look at how one of the funniest TV shows in recent memory was made.

Ramsey Ess is a freelance writer for television, the head writer of his website, a podcaster and a guy on Twitter.

The Day They Got Jesus

Remember back in January when everyone was so delighted by that dude's discovery of the date on which Ice Cube had a good day? Well, prepare to be equally ecstatic for the news that another good day has been dated... Good Friday, to be exact.

Researchers believe that Jesus, as described in the New Testament, was crucified on Friday April 3, 33 A.D. Textual and geological clues, along with astronomical data, support the date. Scientists acknowledge that natural events described in the Bible could be allegorical.

"Could be allegorical" indeed. Anyway, mark your calendars.

Photo by Binkski, via Shutterstock

Free To Be... Straight White Males

Here is a tweet that Gawker writer Max Read retweeted a few days ago.

RT @DavidWinkies: @max_read actually if you call a lawyer and say you're white a dude and str8, they say you have no case #truestory

' max read (@max_read) May 23, 2012

So, sort of a backstory, to begin. Last week brought us two Internet rumpuses regarding and/or demonstrating an especially privileged kind of blindness/obliviousness/ridiculousness. One was TED curator Chris Anderson's flabbergasting decision to withdraw a TED speech about wealth inequality on the grounds that it was "too political." The other, John Scalzi's head-patting essays on Kotaku, comparing straight white male privilege to playing the game of Life, as it were, as if on the easiest setting of a video game. Thus it was that we began to Yak.

David Roth: Maria, I am but a humble sports-doofus. So what is a TED speech? Also, a follow-up: why are there TED speeches?

MB: A question for the ages. Opinions vary wildly. Anya Kamenetz of Fast Company wrote an article in 2010 ("How TED Connects the Idea-Hungry Elite") in which she claimed that TED was "creating a new Harvard'the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years."

DR: Which is hilarious, of course, but also maybe backhandedly/depressingly apt. The New Harvard would naturally be an online correspondence school for very rich adults who want to be flattered w/r/t their role in The Future. The New Harvard should also serve tapas or something.

MB: Maura Johnston took the piece very neatly to smithereens right here at The Awl. Then Kamenetz herself turned up in the comments explaining about how she is Elite, and went to Yale, unlike us Awl guys.

MB: One really does keep reading, though, that "TED talks" are supposed to be improving the public in some way. They're also touted as being "exclusive," because they're so expensive to attend in person, and there is some kind of screening process for attendees. No idea what kind of riffraff they are looking to exclude. I'm imagining A Night At The Roxbury. Alternatively, you may wait and watch the TED speech on the Internet.

DR: "I paid $7,500 to hear the Eat, Pray, Love lady talk about creativity."'A Job Creator.

MB: Exactly, and/or "I watched it on my computer and she sounded like a total ding-dong."

DR: "But I saved what David Roth makes in three months by doing so, so I guess I still came out okay."

MB: But this Nick Hanauer wealth inequality talk last week was different, because it was forbidden the glorious pulpit of TED proper, and so it tore all over the regular Internet instead.

DR: I was startled to find, in the wake of this story, that there are THOUSANDS of these TED talks, all of which people pay to go to. It's like finding out that the people in a David Brooks book are real.

MB: You would have to take acid and travel to an alternate universe for that.

DR: Thousands of Davos Men, out there listening to tech CEOs talk about innovation. Consuming soybeans in symbolically significant ways.

MB: Anyhoo, the guy Hanauer claimed to have been "censored."

DR: The problematic thing, here, seems to be that he is maybe kind of a jerk.

MB: He's terrible! Super bossy, always bragging about his airplane this and his ski chalet that.

DR: A jerk I agree with on the points of his argument, admittedly.

MB: You'd have to be completely insane not to. Insane like Edward Conard, I mean.

DR: But he seems to fit well into the cohort of TED people, which seems like a bunch of very wealthy people who are used not only to being right, but to being dapped up like crazy for how pyrotechnically, dazzlingly right they are, talking past each other in a series of open emails. Emails written in a weird, condescending tone that expresses a sort of disappointment at the other side's inability to comprehend the manifest rightness of the argument they're making.

MB: I suspect the real problem is that these TED guys are "good boys" who have been steadfastly obedient the whole time, and have somehow failed to ask one single tiny question of authority ever. So they should get an A, because that is what always happens to good boys.

DR: The strange thing, I guess, is that these guys are by and large on "our" side of important issues. Like, these are the multi-millionaires who are NOT obsessed with privatizing social security and policing the vaginas of poor women.

MB: The mere absence of villainy isn't enough to make an actual leader, unfortunately. Chris Anderson's response to the Hanauer affair demonstrated a total failure of imagination. He goes, "I think a lot of business managers and entrepreneurs would feel insulted"'what, to be forced to hear that they require markets for their products? Maybe the worst was his monstrous ignorance regarding the economy.

MB: So, how much of this broad-spectrum ignorance is owing to "white privilege", do you think?

DR: To me, the whiteness of all this seems secondary. Or inevitable. This is obviously a white (well, Jewish) guy talking, but I feel like all people, at a high enough level of affluence, converge on a certain colorless whiteness-by-default. Just a sort of assumption that the world works best when it works in the way that's best for you. Which is maybe similar to white privilege, or the same.

DR: It's far harder for me to imagine being wealthy enough to attend a TED conference than it is for me to imagine being, say, someone of a different race with a similar upbringing to mine. (I grew up in a wealthy suburb with less-wealthy parts.)

MB: Really? I can so easily imagine you being rich enough to attend a TED conference.

DR: That's the plan. Write enough 800-word columns for $75, and someday, boom, there I am listening to Marc Andreessen talk about The Future of Innovation.

MB: I ain't saying I can imagine you going, just I can imagine you rich.

DR: I already am. I sold my book "Ham Jokes And Overreaching Political Parallels About Football" for $6.8 million. I'm going to give a TED speech about how hilarious ESPN's AM programming is next week.

MB: Saving my allowance so I can attend in person. My TED talk will be about how the U.S. economy can be saved if only DirecTV will stop snail-mailing to tell me how they "miss" me, because they must have squandered a million dollars and half a rainforest on just me, by now.

DR: (I also think the secret of Davos is that no one goes to ANY presentations, and just chases, like, Eli Broad around all weekend)

MB: Hmm. I could chase Eli Broad for a while. I would be wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and screaming.

DR: In any case, the assumption is the thing. And it's what bothers me about the prospect/fact of TED attendees currently representing the lefternmost flank of the discourse at the moment. The prospect of a discourse in which vicious billionaire libertarian crumbums who also hate gays are one pole and fatuous techno-futurist libertarians who don't hate gay people are the other is really not a very appetizing prospect.

DR: Which, yeah, #privilege to even be having this beef. But also the issue here is that we can talk about Twitter starting revolutions, but we can't talk about power as it exists in our world. At least if it seems "partisan" or "political," which was Anderson's beef with Hanauer's inequality talk. Which, in the end or at least to me, amounted to taking a guy to the woodshed for some Very Uncool Mellow-Harshing.

MB: God, yes. Something else I wanted to ask you about l'affaire Scalzi: these commenters on Kotaku saying look, I am a straight white guy and my life is super effin' hard so fuck you, you know. How do you feel about them?

DR: Sad, mostly? Because most everyone's life is hard. If they think it's because they're straight white guys, they should really read more.

MB: Disagree there. Sometimes I am very sure it must be. Baseless assumptions are made all the time. And this is especially alienating for those white guys who are wronged, of whom there are a lot, with so much suffering these days. Because they are wronged for serious, and then they are yelled at for even pointing out that they've been wronged. On an individual level, this seems terrible.

DR: Yes, those are surely the real victims. I just can't buy that at all, although clearly everyone is (increasingly?) alienated from everyone else. But the version of that alienation that converges on a sense of victimhood is the saddest to me, though. Because it's wrong and small and vain, but more because it makes the whole rest of the world your enemy.

DR: Obviously the internet helps with that. Wealth helps with that. But walking around in a city is a nice reminder that it is bullshit.

MB: "Get over yourself, everyone's life is hard." Same with Hispanics and divorcees, you know, and dinosaurs. All my own demographic niches, I react really strongly against that kind of alienation. Get up, you know. "Come with me if you want to live!"

It seems like such a primitive, obvious thing to have to say, and yet just take a gander at that featured comments thread over at Kotaku, it is eye-popping. This guy wrote an absolute book about how hard he has it because he is a white guy and people don't feel like they have to be sensitive to white guys. He was very sincere, and he was promptly flambeed.

DR: Lots of dudes being all "THIS! I also had to work hard, where I imagine minorities didn't!" in the comments, too, though. But in terms of the flambee-age, I'd say deservedly so. I mean, privilege is privilege, and it's complicated, but there's no reason to be a dick about it.

DR: And more to the point: BIG-BOY PANTS. Does he imagine anyone has it easier? Life is complicated, and clamoring for victimhood is just definitionally Not A Good Look. Especially when you're born with advantages, and then insist on turning turn them into meta-anti-advantages.

MB: You're right obviously (Trayvon Martin alone will silence anyone, in this respect.) I just wish there would be less judging and more compassion for everyone all the time equally.

DR: Agreed. But also, this dude: "I have been in so many situations where I'm expected to go above and beyond what is expected of me because I'm a white guy. I'll be asked to move heavy loads to someone's car or other menial work, even though it's not in my purview, because, hey, I'm the white guy I have been denied jobs because 'well, we have enough guys right now; we really need to hire more minorities.'" I understand that his life is hard, but I would advise he invest in some big-boy pants. Like, the pull-up kind.

MB: Yeah, but this argument, it's like ping-pong, back and forth forever. One side demands that the mean or median effects of white privilege be taken into account, which, again, is a good idea in terms of formulating policy but a terrible idea in terms of determining how you, an individual, should treat other individuals; the other side is insisting look, I am an individual, treat me like an individual!

MB: Anyways, I would hate to be a straight white male myself, because half your peers are complete idiots, horrible, and have made a complete hash of everything.

DR: Oh man, HALF?

MB: DEFINITELY half.

DR: You need to meet more straight white males! We're terrible. I mean, if you want to talk about sports, we're pretty great.

MB: The other half are lovely! I am a lifelong fan. Don't be so hard on yourself.

DR: Or, I guess, get really fussy about meat-restaurants. But beyond that, yikes like a motherfucker.

MB: Plus the gnarly half have hogged all the moneys and the property and power. So if you are an ordinary straight white male and you want even a particle of any of those things, you'd best start apologizing NOW.

MB: Is this fair, I ask you? That it should be so impossible to defend the rights of the decent portion of the straight white male population.

DR: You know, I kind of think that's silly.

MB: Certainly not. I mean, maybe you are a straight white man but what you really are is a person, with your own set of weirdo obstacles, like maybe you are really short, well obviously you are not short, David. But maybe you can't do math or some other thing you need to be able to do.

DR: Sure.

MB: I object to the idea that we don't treat everyone equally.

DR: Although I can do all those things AND I'm tallish, but also shitty at math. But I also reject the idea that there's something actually hard about being a straight white male.

MB: Sometimes there is'but for individuals, not as a group, is the thing.

DR: It may make my novel less appealing'another novel by a straight white man. But also: no doors are closed to me because of that, and anyway white straight dudes have kind of hogged literary fiction for some time.

MB: It COMPLETELY makes your novel less appealing. Another DeLillo! Just what we need. And yes, many doors are closed to you, just like many doors are closed to anyone, for any number of different reasons.
.
DR: You think so? Because I kind of don't think those doors are truly closed. ALSO, I'll take having to rewrite my novel over repeated stop-and-frisk or daily stinkeye or all the other things that come with escaping the curse of being a straight white dude of decent means. And more to the point, I think it's churlish and kind of bullshit to complain about it. Privilege is privilege.

DR: And anyway if I have to write better to sell my novel, I do at least have the benefit of having had my parents send me to a fine liberal arts school with all the MONEY THEY MADE.

MB: Oo, this is just where I wanted to go. All these guys on Reddit (guys of every color, but I'm just talking about the white ones, here) became completely incensed, legitimately incensed, because they'd found themselves on the wrong side of prejudice.

MB: I, on the other hand, am total brown trash and benefited a lot from the opportunities extended to Hispanic girls of slender means. Who could get a decent SAT score. Who were in very short supply, where I went to school. Just by chance. So I was offered more and better opportunities than my white male compatriots of like accomplishments, as a young kid. This is a fact. Just because I was kind of a freak.

DR: You are also smarter and more deserving of opportunities than most people, honestly.

MB: Sorry, no.

DR: What, just because you are short and speak quickly?

MB: Well, in the sleepy seaside hamlet of Long Beach, California, there were maybe two or three Hispanic kids at my high school who could mop the floor with the standardized tests. So the scarcity created value, you see. And freakish-seeming-ness. I mean, I'm grateful!

MB: Anyway, I want to be very clear, what I wish for and what we don't have, is equality. For a young white straight guy not to be resented out of the box but judged on his merits. This is the part of the conservative position that I can get right behind.

DR: Again, though, I haven't felt resented or discriminated against, and I think that the presumption of that resentment is a really good, quick way to become an unbearable, curdled person. The world is the world, that exists, but this quest for victimization is POISON. In politics and personality and everything else. That way lies the cruelest and smallest and most sorry-I-have-to-go-stand-somewhere-else-now solipsism.

MB: Oh I agree, believe me. Not only do I revile the victimhood, I totally help myself to the privilege when I need to. For instance, when I were a lad I used to work in law offices in downtown LA and there are a lot of Spanish-only-speaking guys in that part of the world, and they would be perpetually offering me these very unpleasant observations and invitations, and I would become very crisp and lofty and totally pretend not to have understood and go, "I beg your pardon?" When us brown persons learn to speak exactly like an NPR correspondent, then we can PASS. Which is very useful.

MB: So the colorlessness of privilege, I loved your phrase. It's such an important distinction. What it really means is that you can lay claim to the maximum rights: respect, fair treatment, dignity. That is to say, rights that everyone should have. And if you can get an education, like I did, they are far easier to assert.

MB: But anyway, come on, surely you've felt discriminated against? I am friends with the odd ultra-feminist who will judge you wrong on contact, just for starters. Before learning your name, even. Are you denying this?

DR: It has not been my experience, honestly. Or if it has, I've kind of jogged on by it. Assholes gonna asshole. Again, I'm lucky to be able to say that. But if someone is like "ugh, white sports dude" then I figure I don't need to reach that person. Because what am I reaching? (Also, they must not be familiar with my work, which: their loss)

MB: Because where you can just skate past and not care, I go straight off the deep end, and it's not even directed at me.

DR: I get that. That is a very reasonable response.

MB: And conversely, I really could give a damn about the Hispanic thing, for me personally. I mean, I care a lot about, e.g. the mess in Arizona, but for myself, whatever. Like some editor is asking me about all the Hispanic hoo-ha and I haven't got the faintest clue aside from knowing a bit about the news. I'm like, hmm, I love salsa music (also the condiment) and watching telenovelas with my aunt but otherwise I'm kind of blah on it? I am privileged, in the sense that I don't experience much in the way of prejudice in my life? So why would I be leaning on this?

DR: Right. THAT I could see being infuriating. When I worked in an evangelical real-estate office, I remember feeling like Exotic Jewish Dude, and that was weird. But what it's about, finally, is not feeling caricatured or hamstrung or otherwise dehumanized by your identity. That's close enough to equality, right?

MB: I AGREE. Oh golly, "dehumanized by your identity," that is the thing that truly is hard to articulate and is the real reason the Kotaku commenters got so furious at the Easy Videogame Setting guy. The reason it is so irritating that you can't talk about wealth inequality at TED.

DR: And TED-style libertarian techno-futurism is, finally, intensely dehumanizing, to me. Because the world humans live in is a world of power and influence. That is: of human bias and pettiness and ugliness and smallness and so on. When you lose that context'all of it, all the various kinds of privilege and reflexive privilege-denial'you are not talking about things as they are. You're talking about "killer apps" or "innovation," to and for rich people. The future won't look like that. It won't care about it. It shouldn't.

DR: But the idea of a future where there's a fucking app that gets rid of bad governments and lets us Celebrate Our Preferences via eCommerce' that is not only not real, but also infantilizing, if not quite dehumanizing. Because what are we then? Avatars for Progress?

MB: But in reality the power and influence part is total hogwash because the real story is we're these little temporary organisms hanging around wondering what the hell is going on.

DR: Well, sure. But we all have bosses. They have bosses.

MB: So the overlay of so-called Power is a fantasy, pathetic actually, crumples after a moment's reflection.

DR: And if all those bosses are watching TED speeches about creativity in management instead of remembering that their employees actually need health insurance or whatever, then no one is winning. Because everyone's losing something human in the deal, right?

MB: Yes, bosses. Not to minimize anyone's suffering; on the contrary.

DR: We lose our dignity; the higher-ups lose their agency, or trade it for surfing on Future Tsunamis. And no one makes eye contact with anyone else, somehow, because we're fuming over something or other. All the slights we absorb because we are [Fill In Yourself], and for no other reason.

MB: Yes, yes. Everyone is losing when we make these divisions. White, rich, poor, privileged, conservative, progressive. The sadness of the Facebook IPO.

DR: Oh lord, the tragedy of our time.

MB: What isn't sad about that. Sad little bajillionaires fussing over their bank balances.

DR: And wondering why no one can engage with them. I like that they call them TED "talks," when only one person speaks.

MB: "Power and influence," as you say.

DR: A small, elite segment applauds. Everyone else goes about paying down their credit cards.

MB: Pleasant dreams, Mr. Roth, scion of Privilege.

DR: Ah yes. I'll climb up on this pile of influence and sleep sweetly.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

David Roth writes "The Mercy Rule" column at Vice, co-writes the Wall Street Journal's Daily Fix,, and is one of the founders of The Classical. He also has his own little website. And he tweets inanities!

Led Zeppelin II Dies

Led Zeppelin II is dead. (Also, it took me a while to finally figure out this headline.)

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

My grandmother used to say that my dad was penny wise and pound foolish. Dad would hem and haw over the cost of laundry detergent, but was very laid back in the bigger spends'buying a house, getting a new car, taking the family on nice vacations, and being an all-around generous guy. To her point, one summer after my parents had made a big trip to visit me studying abroad in Australia (while they were also paying for my private university tuition), my dad drove back to a store when he realized he had been over-charged 20 cents on cups of yogurt.  In his defense, he had purchased ten yogurts, so it was a full $2.00 he was refunded.

I used to think this was ridiculous, but then couple months back, I quit my job, and now it makes sense. After seven years in marketing, I decided to give up a very well-paid career for the passionate pursuit of writing for a living. I had saved the equivalent of a livable year's salary as the cushion'and I suppose the deadline'until writing projects pay the bills. 

This 'livable year's salary' I speak of is just that: enough money to pay my non-negotiable existing expenses (rent, utilities, cell phone, car payment, gas, car and health insurance, student loan payments, and groceries). I also accounted for a small discretional budget  ($200/month) for the extra costs of being social in the city: eating an occasional meal out and getting drinks here and there. The budget was designed, however, with the intention of cutting back from my out-all-weekend-every-weekend, fully-employed spending lifestyle.

Much like every diet I've ever tried, the plan has been giving way to lapses in willpower. The 'liveable year' has already been cut down to a 'liveable ten months' due to some regrettable budget-diet cheats (I've had trouble saying no to meals with friends after my monthly discretional budget has been spent). But the steak dinner of my budget-diet cheat was booking a two-week trip to Europe this summer. I justified it by saying, 'When will I ever have this time again?' but the trip easily cut a month out of my cushion budget.

That's when I stepped it up with a page from my dad's playbook. I've clipped coupons before, but it was always a recreational habit. Now it's become a hardcore addiction. I may have minimal willpower when it comes to entertainment expenses, but I have military-grade discipline when it comes to saving on groceries. It's hard to assess for sarcasm without hearing my voice, but just know that I have none whatsoever when I say: What a thrill!  It feels like beating the system when I can leave the grocery store with over 40% in savings on my regular groceries. Coupons have become the Splenda substitute of my budget-diet, and I've used them to justify many of my budget cheats.  Sure, I just bought fancy cocktails on a weekday, but I also just saved $1 on two boxes of Triscuits. It's bound to even out. Right?

My coupon fixation came to a head last week when I was at the grocery store with my boyfriend, with whom I am lucky enough to split my grocery bill (and, you know, rent, utilities, life partnership, joy). Unlike me, he is not an over-spender. But on this particular grocery trip, he really, really wanted a loaf of Challah bread from the bakery. It was $5.50.

This. Was. Ridiculous. $5.50!  That was approximately $4.25 more than the loaf of bread that was on sale with the coupon! And for what? A slightly less stale, more delicious sandwich?  No. I was on the verge of hyperventilation in the middle of aisle two when he gave me the one eyebrow 'you're nuts' look and reminded me: 'You just booked airfare and hotels for two weeks in Europe without batting an eye.'

'Well I'm going to pay for that by saving on groceries!'

Oh holy Jesus. I've become the west coast version of my Australia-trip booking, yogurt-returning father.

It hit me later (after I lost the battle of the bread) that I was never going to sustain my cushion on careful grocery shopping alone. We would need to save that $4.25 on that loaf of bread for about 25 years to make up for the cost for both of our trips. Bigger spending cuts are in order: This upcoming trip will have to be the last for awhile; I'm going to have to just-say-no to dining out for some time; and I should probably reconsider my vehicle choice when my lease is up in December. In the meantime, I'm bound and determined to find a more reasonably priced loaf of Challah. I'd love to go back to Europe, but I don't want 25 years of crappy sandwiches to save up for it.

 

Caila Ball is a Los Angeles based writer. She often gives advice in areas where she has no expertise here and here.

You Got The Right Stuff: A Survey Of Boy Band Dance Moves

The Wanted and One Direction are killing it. This two-pronged British boy band behemoth has hit the shores of the U.S. hard with myriad magazine covers and morning show appearances'1D even became the first British group ever to see their debut album hit number one in the United States. They've sent Tumblrs and young fans into a tizzy, and set the stage for what could possibly be a veritable boy band revival this summer. But as K-pop expert Jeff Benjamin, and others, have pointed out, something's off with these two bands: they don't dance in their videos.

What the hell?! As part of a generation that grew up during the boy band heyday of the late-90s, heralded by Olympians like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC'groups with fierce style and unforgettable dance moves that permeated living rooms and spring breaks everywhere'we find this curious and straight-up tragic. Unable to bear the thought of a world without flying-V formation dance sequences, we surveyed the relatively recent landscape of boy bands to examine the state of choreography in boy bands today. Our goal wasn't necessarily to crown a champion, but to see'as you jump from New Kids to *NSYNC to today'to who falls and who gets down.

A TRUNCATED HISTORY OF BOY BAND DANCING

But first, a bit of history. While not always omnipresent, dancing has arguably remained a staple of excellent boy bands since Berry Gordy decided to hire dancer and vaudeville performer extraordinaire Cholly Atkins to teach his top Motown acts a few moves. Atkins' contributions'even if they were simple synchronized steps'gave live performances by The Temptations, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles and The Four Tops an extra bit of oomph and made dance a necessary component of the complete package Motown promised. It set a precedent that carried into the 70s where even boy bands that played instruments like The Osmonds and The Five Jacksons would incorporate dancing into their live sets and TV appearances.

The 80s marked a boy band renaissance of sorts, led by arguably the first modern group, New Edition. Their dancing'perhaps more than killer hooks and tight harmonies'epitomized the e pluribus unum cohesion necessary for boy band success. Dancing allows for a flawless, cool and effortless coalescence of stylistically unique individuals into a unit mightier than any one boy bander alone. When it all comes together, the whole reigns supreme, but is clearly the sum of its each distinct, outstanding parts (see). The opposite: danceless videos, or sometimes worse, half-assed attempts, that are forgettable, awkward, or plain dull. At the very least, magic's lost.

And now into the Octagon!

THE SCORING SYSTEM

What follows are videos from both One Direction and The Wanted and ten clips from the past 25 years examined and scored on a fairly subjective, somewhat arbitrary, but wholly authoritative-ish ranking system.
' Theme: Costume, setting, context
' Approximate Percentage Dancing: Equals seconds dancing / total seconds of video) x 100
' Execution: Complexity of moves, technique, how it fits with the music; or since we're not experts: dopeness, does it make you go 'ohhhhh shit'
' Band inclusiveness: Everyone knows who's best in the group, but all members remain important)
' Intangibles: The things so great/bizarre things you can't explain, but make the video all the better.
' Overall: We put the Pitchfork-esque hammer down and deliver our final verdict.

Obviously this is far from an exhaustive list (though it's plenty exhaustive in other ways). With the focus on primarily better-known contemporary groups, we wanted to tip our hats to some forebears, but if we included all of them we might never make it out alive. Notable absences include: 90s British heartthrobs Take That and recent MTV Best Boy Band Champion Westlife (though neither danced that much anyway), Shakespeare scholars LFO, R&B heroes and pioneers Boyz II MEN, "Making The Band"-ees O-Town, the always hilarious 2ge+her, ostensibly lost exurban scenesters NLT, plus many, many others.

So are One Direction and The Wanted harbingers of a bleak Footloose-ian future boy bands are headed for? As we watched these clips we noticed dancing isn't totally in peril, but we can't ignore that the recent resurgence suggests choreography may be on its way out. We sure as hell hope not.

ONE DIRECTION
"What Makes You Beautiful" (2011)

Theme: Back to the beach, or back into last spring's American Eagle promo video.

% Dancing: 1%

Execution: Thirty-five seconds in is arguably the one move 1D is capable of: The Hammer'and Harry Styles throws down his fist first, thunderous, after a Phil Collins drum leads into the massive chorus. Liam and Louis try to follow suit when the chorus returns, but after a disastrous attempt Styles, Supreme, has to school them on basics. Apparently fucking up The Hammer banishes you to an unknown netherworld somewhere below the dudes in LFO who aren't Rich Cronin (RIP). Kneel before Mjölnir.

Band Cohesion: Everyone gets some time in the spotlight, but with no dance moves the group's tertiary members gnaw at the strength of their leaders. The outliers are clear: Niall's relegated to the nebulous purgatory of pathetic slo-mo glamour shots, and in true little-brother-tagging-along fashion, keeps his shirt on while the group frolicks in the waves ('So you don't get sunburn,' said Mom). Then there's poor Louis, who throws his arm around Harry like an unwanted hype man grasping for residual swag. Even the band's female friends score more close-ups than Louis. How dare you let extras outshine you.

Intangibles: Harry Styles' majestic hair swoop wields the grace of a soaring avian coasting the atmospheric currents far beyond the stratosphere.

Score: 3
The track's a total hit, but the lack of moves seriously highlights the group's awkward, "X-Factor" bred disjointedness. This is what happens when one of the dudes you choose cowers at the thought of dancing.

THE WANTED
"Glad You Came" (2011)

Theme: Ibiza bender with the boys with decidedly less ecstasy'and even less dancing.

% Dancing: 0.7%

Execution: Despite the song's dance-friendly Euroclub vibe, these dudes can't even be bothered to do more than pump fists, lift cups, and grind up on girls'a weakness befitting the song's embarrassingly suggestive lyrics and uber-limp chorus. At most Max George manages a single dice roll flick of the wrist equal to about one-eighth of a Harry Styles Hammer.

Band Cohesion: Though not spread evenly, everyone gets to lip-sync and creep on some ladies. As far fostering egalitarianism, it's a weak attempt, ostensibly founded on the viewers' inability to distinguish between members in a realm other than their clothes. It's the minimum needed to unite top dog Max George and bottom feeder/bed-head afficianado Jay McGuiness, but both end up as part of the same blob.

Intangibles: McGuiness going full Kewl Dad BBQ Chic in that Hawaiian shirt.

Score: 0.0
This sucks.

98°
'The Hardest Thing' (1999)

Theme: A Vegas showgirl proves her love to her boxer boyfriend by showing up to fight night and overcoming 98°'s grotesque attempts at dancing.

% Dancing: 5%

Execution: 98° keep barely two moves in their arsenal: a display case hand wave, and a point to imaginary tears with an imaginary handgun. Terrible. Head bobbing, fist clutching, and excessive kneeling down to the cameras to score face-time doesn't cut it.

Band Cohesion: Even without dancing, each Degree manages to stand out some in the group shots. Nick Lachey, Jeff Timmons, and Nick Lachey's Turtleneck lead; Drew Lachey tags along with a shred of self-respect left after he doffed that backwards cap; and brochacho Justin Jeffre brings up the rear, looking horrifically awkward and a little too much like Creed drummer Scott Phillips for comfort. Leaving each member to their own devices does keep the ship afloat'till it inevitably collides with the iceberg that is Jeffre's bleached goatee.

Intangibles: Who wore it better?

Score: 1
98°'s slow jam roots may not be totally conducive to choreography, but if you're going to pull any moves at all, at least try.

BACKSTREET BOYS
'Everybody (Backstreet's Back)' (1998 U.S. release)

Theme: Backstreet's tryna get back but their bus broke down (for the second time!) in front of a haunted house! During the night, possessed by El Espirito, each are sentenced to a hellish dream world where they're doomed to live out eternity as specifically un-specific horror movie stock characters.

% Dancing: 43%

Execution: A good chunk of the moves in the solo shots are plain corny, most garish, Nick Carter's mummified lurches; but Howie Dorough conjures some charismatic, vampiric rocks and twists, and AJ McLean makes the most of the mini-crew he grooves with in his Phantom of the Opera shots. The ballroom sequence offers spirited choreography, but the movements can look jerky and goofy, like the inevitable 'Cha Cha Slide' at a wedding.

Band Cohesion: BSB may have been the most even-keel boy band of the 90s. Howie and Kevin were obvious side guys, but alpha dog contenders AJ, Brian, and Nick don't seem that far away as none had that super star oomph to push them into Timberlake-levels'or even Chasez-tiers. Brian never added serious pop pedigree to his pretty boy image, and while Nick seemed to assume the top spot sometimes, maybe he'plus The Shaq Conqueror and the rest of that wackadoo family'just got the most exposure. Watching the clip now, it looks like we might've all done goof'd and failed to hop on the AJ Express To Superstardom, which gives the chorus its quintessential cock-sure sneer and holds down the fort with assured moves.

Intangibles: Shoutout to Nick Carter's Hardy Nickerson jersey. Go, Bucs.

Score: 7.27
Solid dancers all around, BSB usually threw something into the mix, even a AAA mid-tempo ballad like "As Long As You Love Me." They were an impressive group responsible for some monster bangers that still hold up, but without a member with that killer instinct, the BSB aura lacks something special.

BIG TIME RUSH
'Boyfriend' (2011)

Theme: Snoop Dogg is hosting a super sweet 128th and needs the sickest group in civilization to take his unprecedented party to the 'next level.' So out of everyone ever in the history of mankind, he gets Big Time Rush, the four chillest bros since the birth of music to headline his bash. The future is TRON-grade CGI (Sponsored by Red Bull).

% Dancing: 32%

Execution: Big Time Rush hails from the hyper-literal school of group dance, the kind taught in kinder-gyms across the country: A heavenward arm swoop to finger point while singing 'I see that' or dropping down to the ground at 'knock me down.' For flavor they add primitive forearm rolls, rudimentary hand shuffles, and their signature butter churns, all performed with over-exaggerated exertion that's barely charming in junior high musical theater. Miserable. Hardly funny 15 views later.

Band Cohesion: BTR are so unremarkable they easily blend into each other, even with a pretty clear, but simple hierarchy, like what you'd find on'well, duh'a kid's sitcom. Save for a few steps, none of these guys dance in their solo shots, just as a group; and as bogus as it is, it keeps your attention and Big Time Rush from falling apart.

Intangibles: Calvin Broadus can apparently travel through computer networks like a hologram or avatar, yet manifest in a physical form instantly without stress or concern. This ability seems to make him ageless, perhaps immortal. Plus, he can journey across the space-time continuum with enough power to effortlessly bring others safely through the event horizon. Snoop Dogg is beyond The Singularity. That 2Pac Coachella shit was only the beginning.

Score: 3.33
The absurd theme alone warrants a look, but BTR lack so much charisma they had to give Snoop two verses and a heavy visual presence to carry the video.

DREAM STREET
'It Happens Every Time' (2000)

Theme: Inception-level mindfucks in a Windows 98-washed world.

% Dancing: 63%

Execution: Though not throwing out the most inspired moves, Dream Street manage to get funky in that suburbanized hip-hop circa Y2K kinda way. With great attention to detail, the group remains solidly in sync during each messy shoulder shimmy, fierce head snap, or loose hip shakes; it's all balanced with decent quick steps during the brief solo cuts, like Chris Trousdale's Hulkish spin 'n STOMP a minute in. Too bad their signature cross-armed jump punches look like something that starts a playground gangfight.

Band Cohesion: But damn do those big group dance sequences give the video a shot of luster. Sure it's mostly variations on the same jelly-legged pop n glide, but all five nail it with competent coolness. Young Jesse McCartney and Greg Raposo (the tank-topped wonder) are front and center, but those passable dancing chops allow future frosted-tips aficionado Chris, rapscallion Matt Ballinger, and auxiliary bro and back-up muscle Frankie Galasso to shine.

Intangibles: The gross failure to depict innocent puppy love, offering instead creepy shots of tweens trolling for ass on the streets or in a field filled with pigeons and shit.

Score: 6.75491
They may lack the raw steez to take home any sort of crown, but Dream Street's output is still commendable and keeps the group from crumbling. It can be goofy as hell, but at least there's heart.

JLS
'She Makes Me Wanna' (2011)

Theme: It's The Wanted video on an immensely smaller budget, but with at least slightly more dancing.

% Dancing: 33%

Execution: JLS really only dance as a group, and those sequences are chopped up mercilessly'just one or two quick moves per shot before jumping to a different angle and side-step. This fractured style reveals a pretty pathetic attempt to manufacture choreographic continuity; and the cuts move so fast between one another it makes it impossible for anything to resonate. Looks like someone's covering their asses for not knowing how to link successive steps.

Band Cohesion: Top billing is split between Country Club Vice-Treasurer Aston Merrygold, Marvin Humes, and unfortunately for everyone, guest whisperer Dev. But as unimpressive as those dance sequences are, they allot back-up members Oritsé Williams and JB Gill some crucial facetime while doing something at least slightly productive'even if it is just Free-Willying atop some rocks. Not even swaths of neon clothes can save JLS from their incredible blandness; at least they're bland together.

Intangibles: What a dick move.

Score: 4.4
The sub-sub par moves give JLS some life, but Mr. Fusion ain't around to turn their monotonous garbage into plutonium to get the flux capacitor... fluxing.

Next: Six more boy bands and awards!.

Bunch of Newspapers About to Needlessly Hit the Skids

This time it's Newhouse/Advance's turn to destroy a newspaper: the New Orleans Times-Picayune, to be specific, which will fire a bunch of people, stop publishing daily and generally be suckier. (Also: "a new company, NOLA Media Group, will run the newspaper and its website, and another new company will print and deliver the paper." Innnntriguing.) Enjoy your new life blogging on this hot mess! Your move, McClatchy! Oh wait, Jake Gyllenhaal's uncle has got the destruction covered, okay, great. The whole thing about corporate reorganizing is most interesting: "Tribune and Advance are creating subsidiary companies for their newspapers." Hey, that's what I would do if I were going to dump them.

Man Dislikes Mayor

"The man does whatever he wants. Doesn't like smoking in outdoor, public places? Poof, gone. Doesn't like trans fats? Poof, gone. Doesn't like protestors in his neck of the woods? Poof, gone. It's people like him that have all but killed the New York that I love. We now live in a city inundated with self-righteous, self-conscious, nosy, do-goody, premium day care-using, cause-loving goons."
'I dunno who Michael Elka, Times blog commenter, is, but he cracks me up and he's real mad about Mike Bloomberg's illicit heliport use.

Get Ready For The Future, It Is Fires

"For the coming few decades, Randers predicts, life on Earth will carry on more or less as before. Wealthy economies will continue to grow, albeit more slowly as investment will need to be diverted to deal with resource constraints and environmental problems, which thereby will leave less capital for creating goods for consumption. Food production will improve: increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause plants to grow faster, and warming will open up new areas such as Siberia to cultivation. Population will increase, albeit slowly, to a maximum of about eight billion near 2040. Eventually, however, floods and desertification will start reducing farmland and therefore the availability of grain. Despite humanity's efforts to ameliorate climate change, Randers predicts that its effects will become devastating sometime after mid-century, when global warming will reinforce itself by, for instance, igniting fires that turn forests into net emitters rather than absorbers of carbon. 'Very likely, we will have war long before we get there,' Randers adds grimly."
'Well, we've had a pretty good run. Might as well enjoy the next thirty years before the burning begins.

The Internet Is For Sad People

"According to researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology, people suffering from depression tend to spend more time chatting and sharing files with others. Two hundred and sixteen undergraduate students were monitored over a month's time for actual Internet use. Higher scores on depression surveys ' which were given at the beginning of the study ' correlated with higher use. About 30 percent of the students met the minimum criteria for depression."
'Oh my God, I am on the Internet ALL THE TIME. And I blew past the minimum criteria for depression while I was in the womb and already getting nostalgic about how much I would miss it once I popped out. This study SPEAKS TO MEEEEEE.

Photo by michaeljung, via Shutterstock

A Brief History of Pants

Content series are produced in partnership with our sponsors. This edition of "Pants: What Are They!??" is brought to you by Life Khaki from Haggar.

Do you know who really, really cared about pants? Peter the Great, that's who. 'Peter The Who?' you ask? This specific Peter was the tsar of Russia who became the "Emperor of All Russia" in the early 1700s. His tenure was committed to the modernization of Russia, which at the time was not so modern. Of the reforms enacted was the Decree on Modern Dress, issued in 1701, providing for Russians that "the upper dress shall be of French or Saxon cut, and the lower dress and underwear'waistcoat, trousers, boots, shoes, and hats'shall be of the German type." That meant pants, and not those Russian non-pants the peasants were fond of wearing at the time. So maybe the key to pants is Germany?

Yes, I'm still thinking about pants, because men literally recoil from trying to think about pants. Why, some of you wondered, did I journey to the Lehigh Valley Mall, as it is a not very fashion-conscious retail center in an area that is even less so? I mean, between you and me, that was kind of the point, as I was trying to find a baseline of the relationship between normal dudes and their pants. I live in Brooklyn, for the luvva Pete, the epicenter of everything deemed cool in the past ten years. Pants are a way of life there. If I wanted the insight from a clothes-horse, I could go the Great GoogaMooga, which would give me hours and hours to confab with sick-cool pants-loving line-standers.

But where to start? What I need, in this small trite little quest to make peace with pants, is not the views and approval of others. What I need are the facts about pants.

So all right then: whither pants? Obviously, they exist to cover our nethers, which we as a species have historically favored covering. I don't know why this is. I understand clothes, of course'it gets cold out there!'but one wonders if the disposition to nethers-covering is genetic or cultural or at this point, a permanently enmeshed combination. Obviously, I'd as rather walk around without pants as I would gargle battery acid, but is that because of a shame beaten into me by a vast culture of shame, or is it because it's a fool thing to do?

There is an excellent bit of trivia as to the history of the word/concept 'pants,' and who better to rely on for the genesis of 'pants' than the ghost of William Safire, in a 1997 column on the "lexicon" of leg coverings? From this we learn that the term is derived from one Saint Panteleon, in a roundabout way. The Saint'originally a third-century Christian doctor condemned by the Romans, who then needed seven attempts to accomplish the execution'was given the name ('all lion') upon canonization in light of his bravery and general reluctance to actually die. Later, a commedia dell'arte character, buffoonish and wearing breeches all flouncy from waist to knees, was named 'Pantaloon' as an ironic (snarky?) nod to the Saint.

The name came to refer specifically to the flouncy breeches, which new Americans, ever eager to save a syllable, shortened to 'pants.'

So there you have it: pants are American, according to William Safire. That's all for the best, because it's my understanding that, in England, pants refer specifically to the garment worn under the pants, and that it is sometimes implied to be pejorative. This could explain my insistence on referring to pants as "pants" and not as "trousers," which, if clearly the more grown-up term, is also a bit weighted towards the Anglophile. Although there is a bit of tension between the two terms of art, culturally.

(Knickers, however? A bit archaic on this side of the pond, in reference to baggy trousers, and a bit Benny Hill on the other, as another reference to underpants, but from the same etymological source as the New York Knicks: the fictional narrator of Washington Irving's History of New York, Diedrich Knickerbocker. True fact! The more you know!)

The recent history of pants is told in brief memetic spurts, cultural references that became hackneyed nearly as quickly as they ascended into ubiquity. Do we remember that odd dance show featuring normal folk in their skivvies (popular in certain parts)? Do we remember that viral video that culminated in an 'American Idol' appearance before fizzling? And of course the core curriculum of chick lit, something about sisterhood, something pants, something traveling. We do, if we think back hard enough.

Trousers, however, get more respect. In one of T.S. Eliot's more popular works, J. Alfred Prufrock's trousers are not only white flannel but also rolled. Trousers is the preferred term used for the torso-down covering by James Joyce in Ulysses. And even in the slightly-less reputable field of science fiction, the Trousers of Time was coined by Terry Pratchett to help the reader get her head around some of the potential causality violations that come with time travel (spoiler: there's one way in, at the top, yet two ways out, depending on which trouser leg is chosen).

So maybe my inability up to now to take the lower half of my wardrobe is not only the product of a slobbish laziness but also a disregard inculcated by popular culture? How am I to take seriously a punchline? Maybe the answer is to start thinking of them as trousers?

I did actually have a favorite pair of pants once, a long time ago. On a high school trip to New York City, a friend of mine and I hit the used/vintage stores on the stretch of Broadway which is now the bright shiny eastern edge of Soho and walked out with two things: a pink sharkskin jacket with black satin lapels (which we timeshared) and, for me, a pair of West German army-issue fatigue pants. Olive green and the softest cotton I've ever felt, I wore those pants until they literally fell apart, and then cut 'em into shorts and then wore those until they fell apart. I miss those pants, and I've never found anything to measure up to them. They were maybe the only good thing to come from the Cold War. This can't be that hard.

But I did recall a reference to leg coverings that was undeniably useful, if not timely. As a new installment of Robert Caro's life's work has been recently released, President Lyndon Johnson is back in the public spotlight. And while I've (to my discredit) never cracked the cover of a single Caro, I do have in the back of mind that recording of President Johnson speaking to a tailor about ordering some clothes. It's from 1964 and it's available online. A tailor in Texas has sent the president some suits, and Johnson had some very, very specific ideas on alterations for future pairs of pants.

LBJ: Now the pockets, when you sit down, everything falls out, your money, your knife, everything, so I need at least another inch in the pockets. And another thing ' the crotch.... is always a little too tight, so when you make them up, give me an inch that I can let out there, uh because they cut me, it's just like riding a wire fence. These are almost, these are the best I've had anywhere in the United States,

JH: Fine

LBJ: But, uh when I gain a little weight they cut me under there. So, leave me, you never do have much of margin there. See if you can't leave me an inch from where the zipper (burps) ends....

The full thing is some of the most candid audio of a president this side of the Nixon tapes, but more importantly it is the snapshot of a man who cares very much about his pants. He cares about the material, he cares about the cut and he cares about the fit. So maybe the question for me is not, 'Why don't I care about pants?' and instead, 'Why don't I start caring about pants?' (And perhaps: "Why don't pants start caring about ME?")

Were I to start taking into account those three aspects'material, cut, fit'I'd stop having these feelings of sartorial inadequacy.

And even more interestingly, the JH speaking to the president? His name was Joe Haggar, Jr., and not to break kayfabe, as it were, he was the son of the founder of the sponsor of this piece. Yes, this is a sponsored piece, so to stumble across this bit of synchronicity presents a bit of a quandary. But it's a matter of history, ultimately, and so let's just leave it at: isn't that an interesting factoid to uncover? History is so enriching!

Whether you call them pants or trousers (or, fine, slacks, even), I'm going with President Johnson, and I'm going to stop thinking of them as an off-the-rack, predetermined-sized item. Sure, I stumbled across a perfect pair once, but maybe with a minimal amount of effort and attention-paid, the answer appears to be: take an interest and make demands. Then I'll find out if I actually do clean up nice.

This content was created for our partner Life Khaki from Haggar.