With another hectic M-to-F trough-slog in sight, the New Yorker—witty, urbane, perhaps a bit of a poseur—seems like the perfect companion for a lazy Sunday afternoon. This is false. The New Yorker is not a weekend read; it is a prelapsarian one. That is why it makes us so sad: its facts-to-words ratio suggests a positively Renaissance store of leisure time. Indeed, what purpose could the dieresis umlaut possibly serve other than as an aid for ancien regime heads of household, gaily reading aloud the Talk of the Town with the wives and children and servants gathered round? Our parents never read to us.

But, cheer up! Do not spend your hard-earned weekend catching up on the New Yorker; let us do it for you—efficiently, rationally, and dispassionately.

Gawker Weekend's Modern English Reader's Guide to the Interminably Overlong but Still Strangely Compelling New Yorker Article of the Week: "Spider Woman: Hunting venomous species in the basements of Los Angeles" by Burkhard Bilger.

Bilger profiles Greta Binford, a lady who looks for, and studies, dangerous spiders in L.A. But there's more to the story than that, because spiders have an interesting history w/r/t us.

This image was lost some time after publication.
  • What is Said (p. 66):
     Torres stared at her. Binford is small and keen-eyed, with a dark-brown bob and a scattering of freckles across her nose. Her voice has a quick, clear, almost chirping quality, and at forty-one she carries herself with the springy assurance of a high school cheerleader. She didn't look like a crackpot to Torres. Then again, she didn't look like a spider hunter, either. Perhaps she was a health inspector.
  • What is Meant:
     Greta Binford looks like a person.
  • What is Said (p.66):
     Spiders have a bad reputation, largely undeserved. The great majority aren't venomous enough to harm us, or their fangs are too small, or their jaw muscles are too puny, or they simply see no profit in attacking large, indigestible creatures that can rush them with their toes. Unlike snake venom, which is designed to kill vertebrates, spider venom is almost always meant for insects. Its toxins can stop a hornet in mid-flight, but they lack proper targets in the human nervous system. "If we were wired for spider venoms the ways insects are, we would be screwed," Binford says.
  • What is Meant:
     Some spiders can kill you, and they're the ones that interest Binford.
  • What is Said (p.68)
     Spiders tend to be solitary hunters, and they demand the same single-mindedness from scientists. The French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre set the pattern in the late eighteen-hundreds, when he retired to Provence after a career in chemistry and physics, and spent the rest of his life studying the bugs in his garden. "When we lack the society of our fellow-men," he wrote, "we take refuge in that of animals, without always losing by the change."
  • Fabre delighted in what he called "experimental villainies." He might catch a bumblebee in a bottle and send it buzzing down a tarantula's den, or steal a female spider's egg sac and replace it with a ball of cork. (She couldn't tell the difference, he found.)
  • What is Meant:
     The past was infinity times better than the present.
  • What is Said (p.69)
     Early in her career, when she was in graduate school at the University of Utah, Binford tried focusing on the milder side of entomology. She had become fascinated with evolution after leaving the Church, and wanted to understand what gave rise to the biodiversity she'd seen in the rain forest. Spider evolution, though, has mostly murderous ends. The forty thousand species identified so far make their homes from the slopes of Mt. Everest to the islands off Antarctica, and nearly everything they do is in quest of fresh meat. Just as birds can be identified by their singing, so spiders can be sorted by their methods of killing.
  • What is Meant:
     God is dead.
  • What is Said (p.70)
     The most notorious spider in Europe in Fabre's time was the Italian tarantula, Lycosa tarantula. Named for the town of Taranto, on the southern coast, this was a large, fearsome-looking wolf spider — no relation to American tarantulas — whose bite was said to cause madness, melancholy, and death. A victim's only hope was to dance furiously for days on end, often accompanied by fiddles and pipes, until his body gave out and the venom wore off. Liszt, Chopin, and Mendelsohn later wrote music for stylized versions of these dances, which came to be known as tarantellas.
  • "Must we take these queer things seriously or laugh at them?" Fabre wondered.
  • What is Meant:
     Dance marathons are fun, but totally gay.
  • What is Said (p.72):
    The key to food hunting, Binford said, was to have a "search image" in mind. Wolf spiders, for instance can be found by their eye shine. When you train a flashlight beam over your back yard at night and see a faint glimmering in the grass, those might be spiders gazing back at you. Loxosceles tend to splay their legs like asterisks, and to gather in pockets of dampness — anything from the bottom of rotting logs to the spaces behind steam pipes. "It reminds me of hunting for morels as a kid," Binford said. "There's a kind of Zen moment where everything falls away and there's just you and the spider."
  • What is Meant:
     You will never know happiness like hers.
This image was lost some time after publication.
  • What is Said (p.73):
     Binford looked around, grinning, entirely at home. Then she ran out to the car to get the cooler full of spiders that she'd collected. She seemed proud and a little nervous showing them off, like a kid with some brand-new Hot Wheels. She was especially excited about those she'd found earlier that day, in a desert reserve outside Palm Springs. They looked like Loxosceles Martha, she said, the last of the North American species she had left to find. Kristensen held one up to the light. He peered at its appendages and noted its fine orange color, and soon they were chatting companionably about genitalia.
  • What is Meant:
     It's almost Monday. Get ready for your much suckier job.