You know how it is: a three-day weekend, a hacked Sidekick, a nasty K-hole, and suddenly your schedule is fucked. Intern Alexis, unfortunately, is no exception. It took us a few days to realize she was missing, but once we did, we conducted an exhaustive search — only to find her in a waxing room at Completely Bare, lying in the fetal position, stoned, and babbling about kittens in mittens. We got her cleaned up, of course, and put her right back to work. After the jump, her weekly coverage of the New York Times book review, in all of its sobering glory.

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety
 By Judith Warner
Reviewed by Judith Shulevitz

Shulevitz opens her review on a frustrated note and writes: After God knows how many thousands of books, articles and talk shows on the rapid-aging process human resources professionals politely call 'the work-life balance,' we have had about as much as we can stomach on the subject. Agreed! Who cares about upper-middle class mothers pulling their hair trying to get their kids into the right preschools and enrolling their three-year olds in beginning Swahili classes as they try to make partner? BO-RING! It turns out, though, that despite her claims, Shulevitz cares. While seemingly poo-pooing the beat-into-the-ground topic, she spends three very long pages discussing it. Haven t these women seen Supernanny, our new favorite TV show? Just let Jo take over, and there ll be no more mommy mystique problems.

Letters to the Editor

In the wake of Gregg Easterbrook s crafty bit of rhetoric on Jared Diamond s Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel, Daniel C. Dennet, in his letter to the editor, calls Easterbrook out on being an ignoramus and claims that A book as important as Collapse by a scientist as eminent as Diamond deserves a reviewer who has some professional knowledge about the topic. Easterbrook snaps back: Now, perhaps Dennett did not like my counterarguments, but that is another matter he should simply say he disagrees, rather than go directly to impugning my character. Just as the Times ran A.J. Jacobs defense-or-rama in response to Joe Queenan s downright biting review of his book The Know-It-All Is this a pattern we re sniffing out here? Book Review runs too-mean review. Book Review realizes error of its ways. Book Review publishes defense of book. Book Review throws pizza party for all parties involved! I ll take mushrooms and onion please! Humble pie is for dessert


Big Bang
 By Simon Singh
Reviewed by Owen Gingerich

We were in the outside in the hall math class in lower school and we very, very nearly failed intro to astronomy in college, so Owen Gingerich s epicycle -this and non-steady state distribution of radio sources -that was going way, way over our head, until our eyes landed on two all-too familiar words: Frat House. We totally majored in BEER (and minored in rock n roll!!! Second minor in getting up to no good!) and were all, Keg stand! Keg stand! Keg stand! as Gingerich mused, I vividly recall a 1953 frat house discussion with three leading scientists concerning the steady-state theory announced by the Hoyle group in 1948. Hold up wha!? Walter Baade, then undoubtedly the world s pre-eminent astronomical observer, argued there were not enough of the young galaxies required by the steady-state scenario. The physicist George Gamow insisted that the relative abundances of the elements could best be explained by a Big Bang cosmology And Gerard Kuiper, a distinguished planetary astronomer, noted the conflict between Hoyle s theory and the Bible. Um, and then Baade got totally wasted, passed out, and Kuiper, who had just did 5 consecutive whippets in a row wrote I take it up the butt on Baade s face with a Sharpee as Gamow quietly date-raped a pre-frosh in the other room. I miss college

The Displaced of Capital
 By Anne Winters
Reviewed by Emily Nussbaum

Emily Nussbaum s review of Anne Winters book of poetry about New York was all well and good, but we think we may have uncovered something with ultimately groundbreaking implications. Anne Winters, it turns out, is Project Runway's Wendy Pepper.

This image was lost some time after publication.


Winters (at left) and Pepper.

See?!

Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra
 By Jordan Fisher Smith
Reviewed by Alan Burdick

Who hasn't envisioned life as a park ranger? Alan Burdick asks un-ironically at the beginning of his review of Jordan Fisher Smith s park ranger tell-all Nature Noir. Um, I can name one person. And her name begins with A. And she is an intern. Burdick writes that on Fisher Smiths patrol, he encountered people who, among other things, drink to excess, shoot off fireworks and firearms, mine for gold, steal trees, commit assault, commit suicide, parachute from a bridge, toss a parachute-wearing chicken from a bridge, and throw rocks at the Samaritans — hundreds of feet below — who try to disentangle the hapless chicken from said parachute. Hapless chickens? As the man said, Who hasn t envisioned life as a park ranger?

Essay: The Subtitle that Changed America
 By Ben Yagoda

For the first time in we don t even know how long, we loved the NYTBR s backpage essay. Yagoda uses this page to discuss the rise of the meaningless, redundant subtitle the omnipresent An American Life, for example, or James Surowiecki s Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. This sort of trivial, irrelevant, word-obsessed, essay was just up our alley and a great advertisement for the essayist, Ben Yagoda. You re hired!