My thanks to Stacey Harwood and David Lehman for inviting me to blog my thoughts from time to time. . . . . I am proudly contrarian. You tell me the conventional wisdom and I will instinctively take the opposite position. . .For example I believe that a good cover story is "Can Men Have it All?". . and the next time I hear the words "double standard" I am going to say "how come elite schools like Wellesley and Bryn Mawr can stay single sex?". . .The new SI swimsuit issue is on the stands, fans. . .I love porn… In a New York elevator the other day I heard a woman, in her young 20s, say to a slightly older woman "Thanks for femsplaining that" and then both of them laughed as if I wasn't there . .I spent an hour trying to rhyme that line and came up with "Do these jeans make my ass look fat?" . . .If you were the NY Review of Books and your cover announces an essay on "The New Populism," would you illustrate it with (1) a caricature of a bespectacled Harvard professor who became a US Senator from Massachusetts, or (2) a young black man in a hoodie, or (3) a couple of guys pulling on a beer at a truck stop, or (4) Taylor Swift? . . .I believe that a true intellectual prefers John Ford to Jean-Luc Godard . . . A fake intellectual attacks Woody Allen for not making movies about black people. . .I like the line in a movie where a pompous executive apologizes to the employeees he is firing and asks them what else he can do and somebody answers, "You can die". . . I don't remember which movie. . . Maybe some reader will know . .Fuck the Olympics. — Walter Carey