I’m criminally tired today, to the point that a third cup of coffee is not the solution. What is? Short Attention Span Bloggage Theater, that’s what!

A lede that made me laugh:

British Oscar winner Kate Winslet has revealed exclusively to marie claire magazine that she was bullied as a child and lived with the nickname ‘Blubber’.

When I started as a freelancer, I thought maybe I’d pitch some stuff to women’s magazines, even though other freelancers warned me off with waving arms — “they’re run by insane people, they make ridiculous assignments, they change their minds when you’re 90 percent done and expect you to redo the whole thing for no more money, and they take forever to pay.” I never did much pitching to them, as it turned out; they didn’t like my ideas, so I turned my efforts elsewhere. The only person I’ve even heard of who is successful with the lady books writes under a pseudonym, so as not to sully her more upmarket reputation as an respected essayist.

But mostly I’m discouraged by, you know, reading them. Someone sat down at a keyboard and had to actually write that stuff about Kate Winslet. I hope they had as much fun writing as I did reading. It’s the “has revealed exclusively” that slays me every time, that Hedda Hopper/Deadline USA/stop-the-presses usage that only serves to underline the triviality of the revelation. It’s a staple on the gossip blogs. Someone is always revealing something exclusively to some ink-stained hack. In fact, I think they’ll keep calling themselves ink-stained hacks well into this century, long after ink has gone the way of quill pens.

That was my favorite part of “Shakespeare in Love” — the scenes of Will at work, sharpening his pens, dipping and scratching, the ink gradually spreading up his fingers. You had to be motivated to be a writer, once. Which reminds me of my favorite passage from that Christopher Buckley piece we discussed earlier in the week:

He fired up his computers. He hunched unsteadily over his keyboard. I hovered behind, ready to catch him if he pitched forward.

“I’m going to have to dictate to you,” he said.

“I’m a little rusty at WordStar,” I said. “It’s been a quarter-century or so.”

Pup still used the word-processing system he first learned in the early 1980s. Generations of his computer gurus had had to install this antiquated system in his increasingly sophisticated computers, which were like F-22 fighter jets with the controls of a Sopwith Camel.

WordStar, jeez. I hadn’t thought of that in a thousand years. I can’t even remember what word processor I used back in the Cenozoic era, on my very first IBM PC — WordPerfect, maybe? The thing required so many floppy swaps that I went back to the typewriter after the novelty wore off, and stayed there for a few years, until we bought our first Mac and adopted MS Word, a program I have come to loathe. Lately I’ve been doing most of my in-and-out writing on Google Docs. Walter Feigenson has an amusing recollection on his intersection with the Buckleys and WordStar, prompted by the same passage.

Right before my last Mac died I downloaded WriteRoom, which is sort of like WordStar for those of us who suffer from fatigue-induced ADD — green letters, black screen, no distractions.

Finally, Jim at Sweet Juniper is not only ten times the reporter I am, he puts me to shame with his curiosity. He’s the full-time dad to two little kids, and he still finds time to photograph dozens of bottles of hobo pee. If you don’t click that link, you will be sorry.

I was working my way through this story about today’s GOP dilemma — a broader party or a purer one? the headline asks — when it occurred to me this is exactly what some were saying, with great pleasure, when the current pope was elected. It would be a smaller church once Benedict XVI drove out all the lesser souls, but a purer one, and yes, that was exactly the word they used — purer. And while the Catholic church and the Republican party have very different missions in the world, it’s interesting that both are having the very same discussion, isn’t it?

I’d make my own observations about it, but as I may have told you: I’m tired. You feel free.

And now it’s 10 a.m. Work beckons.

The newspaper meltdown has moved beyond tragedy and well into farce. Michael Miner at the Chicago Reader reports on a journalism awards banquet in that great city. One of the winners, Melissa Isaacson, had been laid off two days previous. She heard her name called, went up to collect her plaque, and found…

…(By) the time she made her way up front to accept her plaque it had disappeared. That’s because (still-employed Tribune managing editor Jane) Hirt had hopped up from the Tribune table next to the dais to claim it for the Tribune. “My friends asked me later if I got to bask in any of the applause,” says Isaacson, “but there was no basking. I had to go find my award.”

I think Isaacson got the best part of this deal. She lost a plaque, but gained a much better story she can tell for the rest of her life. The plaques I gathered in my cursed career are all in a box in the basement somewhere, and the most good any of them did me was when we used one of Alan’s AP awards to prop open a window with broken sash cords. It was a little bust of Mark Twain, and was just the right height to do the job. (This was in our home office, and I found inspiration in his little golden face, holding up my window on warm days. Twain would have appreciated it, too.)

And I remember when the debate over journalism awards was about Gannett, famed at one time for buying great papers, turning them into pale imitations of their former selves, and then buying ads that claimed all its papers’ Pultizers for itself, even those won before under previous ownership. (Gannett is now famed for surviving into the current era.) Times have changed.

The understatement of the year, that.

So how is your week going? I’ve been tracking swine flu. This is part of my night-shift job, editing health-care news. It leaves me both optimistic and, well, not. The optimism comes when I reflect on what a marvel our public-health system is when it works well, and so far, I think it’s working well. You’re already hearing the usual naysayers, pointing out that tens of thousands die from the flu in a normal year, that most people are recovering from this particular variety just fine, that once again, the government is spreading panic, etc.

I would advise these folks to read past the second paragraph. The public-health emergency declared over the weekend, as was pointed out in nearly every story, was mostly a formality. The comparison was to declaring a tropical storm a hurricane; it frees up money and staff to work on it, and is not even close to a cry to run for the hills. A global pandemic, even of a viral illness most will sail through with little more than lost time from work, is nothing to sneeze at. (Sorry.)

The discouragement comes from the realization that despite all these professionals and this modern information-dissemination system, we really remain incredibly ignorant of some pretty simple things about our health. You know how many stories have moved assuring people that they cannot get swine flu from eating pork? I’ll tell you: Scores. The confusion comes from something Alan used to harp about all the time when he was a health reporter: We don’t really know what flu is. It’s a respiratory illness. It affects the lungs. You get it when people cough their germs in the air nearby, and they fly over to you and make themselves at home. But because we’ve christened every case of stomach upset “stomach flu,” it’s probably natural that some will figure it comes from something you ate.

Anyway, it’s probably a good time to short your pork futures.

In health journalism, as in all things, there’s a huge gap between the best and the rest. The best are incredible; my shift covers publication of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today, and all three have ace health reporters who not only know their beats, but can explain them capably to the average reader. And then there’s the rest:

“It’s a fine line between educating people and frightening them,” said Dr. Marvin J. Tenenbaum, the director of medicine at St. Francis Hospital on Long Island. He has been making the rounds of patients and responding to their concerns about the outbreak, concerns that he said had been amplified by patients’ watching cable news in their hospital beds.

Even as news anchors preach caution and pledge that they do not want to cause undue anxiety, the sheer demands of the 24-hour news cycle of cable news and the Internet have amplified the story. Typifying the sometimes overheated coverage, a Fox News Channel commercial on Wednesday exclaimed that “swine flu plagues the nation” and urged viewers to tune into prime-time coverage.

And you know what? The reporting was probably OK. But when you try to boil a story down to a phrase in the promo department, you come up with “plagues the nation,” and the good work goes down the drain.

All I have to add is: Wash hands frequently. Avoid Mexico for now. And read the good newspapers.

I’m late today, so just brief bloggage:

It’s true that editorial cartoons in newspapers are true relics of a time gone by. In an era when anyone can be a Photoshop cartoonist, when Get Your War On shows the hidden humor in MS Word clip art, there’s something just sooo 19th century about the sketch at the top of the ed page. On the other hand, there are still a few truly gifted practitioners still at it. The times that editorial cartoons have made me laugh, chances are the artist was Mike Peters.

Happy hump day, all.

Yesterday I received an e-mail forward, the original sender a respected, recently bought-out Detroit columnist, announcing his new position with an internet startup that shall remain nameless. It’s not “hyperlocal” but it is zip code-targeted, and since I have my own startup with a similar model, of course I checked it out.

Hmm. Reuters, Reuters, Reuters, no local copy yet, more Reuters and oh look, here’s a story with a byline and dateline, followed by an abbreviation of the site name, which in my world signifies locally produced, original content. (By Cubby Reporter, COPENHAGEN (AP) — like that.) It’s a story out of Maryland and it’s locally sourced, tightly written and professionally presented. Which means it’s time to fire up the Google and, oh my, whaddaya know, it’s stolen.

Down to the last comma, it’s stolen. Only the byline is changed, which I’m sure would come as a surprise to the reporter who wore away his shoe leather getting it in his employer’s paper. So I checked out another story on the main page, also branded with a byline and the site’s name, and it’s stolen, too. From the Associated Press. So. E-mails to the thief and the victims, screen caps for all, and my work as Junior Journalism Detective is done, except for a small rant:

I AM SICK TO DEATH OF THIS SHIT. In my research yesterday, I found a few press releases about this startup, all crowing that they intended to pick up the pieces of the shattered newspaper business’ advertising base. “There’s a new paper boy in town,” was the money quote from the local contact, an ex-radio guy. Well, the new paper boy is delivering crap. Today’s front page has a story on swine flu with no fewer than four bylines, all with the site’s local-content signifier. Two are associated with various conspiracy websites and one runs an online “vaccine information center” that — I hope you are not surprised by this — opposes mandatory childhood vaccination. And that’s who’s writing about swine flu. (And yes, I suspect they don’t know they’re writing about swine flu for this particular website, but I only work on behalf of real journalists. They can enforce their own copyright, if they care to.)

I read some comments from a fellow print journalist the other day, speculating that this is really only the beginning of the end, that the next stable business model for legitimate journalism is at least a generation away, maybe two. In the interim, we’ve got a long walk through a dark forest to look forward to.

The proprietor of the thievin’ site replied to my e-mail yesterday, apologizing for this unfortunate incident, claiming it was the result of a dishonest “user:”

We get 100′s of articles submitted every day by users. We try and go through them and validate them but some slip through the cracks.

I used to think the low entry bar to journalism was a good thing. We’re not a profession; we’re barely even a craft. If you can tell a story to someone else, you can be a journalist. Come, join the marketplace of ideas. Now I’m not so sure.

Rant over.

I’m looking out at a chill rain, alas, and it feels very British, for some reason. The last few days, the temperature was in the 80s, with a strong, hot wind blasting out of the southwest, air imported from Texas or somewhere. It was enough to awaken all the flowers, push the last tulip open and make the weeping cherries weep. It’s times like this I look out the window at all this new green and think: I am so glad I don’t have pollen allergies. Imagine suffering through a winter like we just had, and then finally seeing spring arrive, only to greet it with? Suffering.

Not much bloggage today; you guys have already seen the 747-buzzing-New-York pictures, so no need for me to call attention to them here. But speaking of copyright, I have bookmarked the blog of the increasingly tiresome Lawrence Lessig, and it was through him that I found this NPR story on novelist Mark Helprin, who has stepped forward as spokesman for the pro-copyright argument. The story contains an excerpt from a book he’s recently published on the subject. If only we had a less windy spokesman:

At age fourteen, on a cheap three-speed Robin Hood bicycle that my father inexplicably (to me) provided as a replacement for a magnificent English touring cycle, the color of a Weimaraner, that I had left to rust in the rain, I set out on a trip across most of the country. A great deal happened in those months: I was not many miles away from Earnest Hemingway on a sunny July morning in Idaho at the instant of his death; in the lobby of an office building in Arizona, Barry Goldwater informed me that I was not permitted to carry the hunting knife that hung from my belt; and with what now seems like a remarkably small number of other visitors to Zion National Park, I listened to a park ranger’s radio as the Berlin Wall crisis unfolded. In regard to copyright, property, and decency, the pertinent incident occurred in a field in Iowa.

A crowdsourced rewrite of that paragraph could only improve it. At least I hope so.

OK, 10 a.m. cometh and I have lots of work today. Take it away, lovely readers.

Such a bouquet of delights was the NYT magazine yesterday. (I know the magazine publishes online a few days beforehand, but I’m ol’-skool, and wait for the pleasures of Sunday morning and its coffee and waffles.) I was looking forward to Christopher Buckley’s memoir excerpt, after noting Brother Rod and the Pontificatin’ Pedants wringing their damp hands over it earlier in the week. Is this Christopher Buckley’s “Mommie Dearest?” Rod wondered, describing the Buckley scion’s portrait of his mother as a “mean, lying bitch.”

After taking my own measure of the piece, I can say it must be difficult to go through life as a writer who is unable to actually, you know, read. It’s true that Buckley did acknowledge his parents’ many faults, which I guess in Outer Wingnuttia is a capital offense, but I don’t see how anyone could read the portions of “Losing Mum and Pup” that were published this weekend and come away with the idea that the surviving Buckley is getting even somehow. This is an enormously affectionate portrait of two complicated people who had a full complement of virtues and flaws. Normal adults know this is the way of the world, but in a culture that idolizes The Family, I guess it’s better to sweep these difficult truths under the rug and never speak of them again.

I don’t get it. But here’s what I know: Writers, particularly memoirists, are charged with one job over all others — telling the truth. If you can’t tell the truth — and that is perfectly fine, not every truth must be told — don’t even pick up your pen. Keep your mouth shut. You don’t have to wallow in the bad stuff; part of telling the truth is telling the whole truth, painting the lights and the darks, because only a portrait with a full range of tones can come anywhere close to a fair rendering.

Stipulated: The truth will vary from person to person. The truth is not the same as accuracy. The truth is never the whole truth, and rarely nothing but. But for Christopher Buckley to publish a book that does nothing but underline the fantasy others have about what his parents “must” have been like — that would be a lie. The world has enough lying writers. (All of these stipulations are themes in Laura Lippman’s excellent “Life Sentences,” now available at an Amazon kickback link near you.)

You know the first column that really landed Tim Goeglein on my radar? It was something he wrote about his parents after one of their anniversaries, about how their thousand-year marriage had been blessed personally every day by Jesus, who guided their lives down to the last detail, and as such kept them from ever making a serious mistake or speaking a cross word, and how he personally handed over every one of their children in a holy glow of pure white light, and every one of those children was brought up in the way of the cross, and blah blah blah.

I thought: The bullshit is strong in this one. He bears watching.

Goeglein was a guest at the Buckleys’ from time to time, not that he ever dropped their names, but I remember his making some reference to “my friend Pat” in a column that was obviously Mrs. B. It was right after William F.’s death that I went looking to see if he’d written anything about conservatism’s fallen lion, and, well, we know how that turned out.

Lesson: Tell the truth. (My truth: I have perhaps embroidered the details of that Tim column. But not by much! More truth: I met Christopher Buckley once, at a library event. He was charming at an Olympic level. Whatever flaws his parents had, they knew how to raise a son to hold up his end in social situations.)

Elsewhere in the magazine, Virginia Heffernan takes a look at reader comments, a feature-not-bug of legit publications that I suspect we’ll be wrestling with for quite some time:

Anne Applebaum is an American political journalist living in Poland whose columns appear weekly in The Washington Post and on Slate. Her views are pro-free-trade and generally hawkish. A Thatcherite in the 1980s, and a supporter of Obama for president in 2008, Applebaum is stoutly pro-immigration, pro-intellectual and anti-torture. Last year Foreign Policy magazine declared her one of “the world’s most sophisticated thinkers.” In awarding the 2004 prize for general nonfiction to her book “Gulag: A History,” the Pulitzer committee called it a “landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.”

But what does the analog world know? Online, readers see Applebaum and her work quite differently. To read The Washington Post’s comments section is to discover an outraged throng that insists she knows absolutely nothing. Not long ago, a poster named jbburrows pronounced Applebaum a “liberal fool.” Respondus described her as “a lapsed neo-con addict.” Lloyd667 on Slate wrote, “Anne gets just about everything wrong.”

Just about everything.

This is something I’ve wondered about for a while: Why are the comments on my sole-proprietor, no-budget, stitched-together, lame-o blog so wonderful, and those on professionally done, big-budget, well-respected sites so terrible? I’ve referred in the past to the Free Press Klavern, the slavering, anonymous, brain-free troupe of readers who feel obligated to chime in on every Detroit story and turn it racial. Let’s just go over there and see…

OK. Here’s a feel-good story about one of the city’s most prominent businessmen, who’s married to a younger woman (not under nefarious circumstances; he was a widower). She’s expecting twins. Let’s just fish one out of the hat:

Are they really his? I guess we will have to see what they look like.

And so on. Big media companies go to great, painstaking lengths to make themselves “diverse” inside and out, and Gannett probably goes the furthest — they were the company that decreed from on high that reporters must seek out non-white sources on all stories. (Which spawned some of the great inside-baseball media stories, which we can all tell one of these days after it sinks beneath the waves.) I can’t imagine being a black reporter or editor, working hard on a story, and having this stuff attached to it like a hemorrhoid. (It’s not just race that excites the yahoos, but that’s topic No. 1.)

I’ve heard different things about Gannett comment threads, but all via grapevines, nothing official. The gist is that they purposely keep their hands off, for legal reasons — if you moderate, you’re responsible for what appears there, but if you don’t, you’re not, so the explanation goes. It makes no sense to me, but then, I’m not a lawyer.

It’s the anonymity that brings out the beast in people, of course. Take away the name, and people feel free to say any damn thing that bubbles out of their id. I don’t except myself, either — I’ve been an anonymous blog commenter in the past, and while I don’t do it anymore, I will say that it served its purpose. But most people who comment here are anonymous or at least somewhat shrouded — I know Coozledad’s real name, and it is neither Coozle, nor Dad — but we generally keep things decent and respectful.

Maybe it’s the anonymity, plus the size of the net cast. When you’re one of thousands reading a MSM website, it just seems easier to spew. I don’t know. I do know I’m grateful to you folks for being the fabulous community you are, from sea to shining sea and then to a few more seas (hello, Copenhagen!). Don’t ever change, or if you do, just get funnier and smarter.

Russian-study time. Have a great day.

Part of my duties at GrossePointeToday.com is compiling the public-safety reports. After three weeks of this, I’m ready to wrap myself in cotton batting, sell the bikes at a garage sale and never go outdoors again.

It’s the drunk drivers, of course. Most of these arrests are well after dark, when I’m safe in my wee bed, but the other day I came across a report for a broad-daylight arrest, on a residential street where I ride my bike. The driver blew a .23, driving with a dog in his lap. For some people, cocktail hour boils down to “any hour that I’m awake.”

This got me thinking about Alcoholics I Have Known, and the humiliations they went through en route to either sobriety or a parting of ways with your truly. Bed-wetting, seizures, property destruction, emotional devastation, and the usual run-ins with the authorities. I thought of the times I spent watching drunks make that another-round gesture at the waitress, the circling finger.

“But I don’t want another,” I might say.

“That’s OK, I’ll drink yours.” Never let a cocktail go to waste.

A year or so ago, I linked to a Washington Post profile of Elmore Leonard, the first I’ve ever read that discussed his drinking problem, conquered years ago:

One day in the early 1970s, Dutch came back from one trip to Los Angeles — where he might go through 20 drinks in a day — and started throwing up blood. It was acute gastritis. His doctor told him this was usually seen in “skid row bums.” He found himself arguing with his wife “every single night,” with him saying “vicious things, which I couldn’t believe the next day. I’d be filled with remorse.”

He moved alone into the Merrillwood Apartments, where he lived and wrote and went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and tried to stop drinking for another three years. “I was flat broke.” The book he was working on, “Unknown Man #89,” was rejected by 105 publishers before finding a home.

“It was a very difficult time,” remembers Bill Leonard.

The couple divorced in 1977, the year he had his last drink — Scotch and Vernors ginger ale one morning while shaving.

It was funny to read this, because alcoholism was a theme in his 1970s-era work, and even a casual reader would know the details came from having walked the walk — staggered the walk, maybe — to the point that I had to put “Unknown Man #89″ down from time to time and let it soak in for a while. Two characters are alkies in various stages of recovery, and the picture he paints of one of them sitting in a Cass Avenue bar, ordering glass after glass of cheap white wine, is like something by Edward Hopper. He even gets the stance of the bartender down, the way he leans back against the ice machine and props one foot up behind him, hand resting on his thigh. I think I’ve been to that bar. It’s called the Good Times. Ha ha ha.

The other detail that kills me: The drunk drinks wine. Because everyone knows that if you only drink wine, you’re not an alcoholic. I know a guy whose dad killed a fifth — yes, an entire bottle — of bourbon every night between 5-something, when he walked in the door, and 8-something, when he went to bed. His mom nearly matched him. She had to have a hysterectomy, and the doctors told her she needed to at least taper off before the surgery, so she switched to wine, usually two bottles a night. The father was a high-ranking executive at a major corporation, had a Harvard MBA. He wasn’t an alcoholic because he had an important job that he was good at.

(They had four boys. One had a drinking problem and died young in a one-car fatal, another lost his medical license for self-prescribing heavy-duty narcotics, a third was diagnosed with Korsakoff’s syndrome while still in his 30s and the fourth seems OK. The old man was told he was threatening his health with his drinking and quit in his old age, justlikethat. Well, he always did have an iron will.)

There’s another Leonard book, “Freaky Deaky,” with a character who probably does have Korsakoff’s, although it’s not stated out loud. He’s just addled from a life of drinking. I love that Scotch-and-ginger-ale detail from the writer’s life, because there’s a long passage in that book about an end-stage alky’s morning routine — his servant brings him two vodka-and-ginger-ales on a tray for his eye-opener:

Donnell would have to wait for the swollen face to show life mixed with pain, then for the man to get up on his elbow and take the drink. Donnell would then step out of the way. Soon as the man finished the drink he’d be sick starting right there if he didn’t get to the bathroom in time. Starting this wake-up service, Donnell had brought the man Bloody Marys, till he found out being sick was part of waking up. Did it one week and said, Enough of this Bloody Mary shit, cleaning up a bathroom looked like somebody’s been killing chickens in it.

Part of living with an alcoholic means cleaning up their messes — of all sorts. I never had much of a taste for it.

A note: Every so often I write about drinking in this petulant tone, and it usually kicks up a private e-mail from a reader, suggesting I’m “struggling” with drinking myself. For the record: I find myself drinking less these days than ever — hardly ever during the week, mostly only on Friday and Saturday night. Since I’m chronically sleep-deprived, one too many glasses just makes me soporific. Also, the older I get, the less I need to drink to feel it the next day. Hangovers suck. I’m lucky to down three glasses on a Saturday night, these days. So I’m cool. If I’m struggling with anything, it’s how to pass these lessons down to the next generation. Is it possible to learn about drinking without major trial and error? I wonder.

OK, then. Off to work. A bit of bloggage before I go:

Chris Matthews: Capable of learning?

I wonder if it drives Alice Waters crazy that successful cookbooks are written by people like Hungry Girl. “Cap’n Crunch Chicken” — it is to laugh. (If you click through, examine the picture and weigh in: Cheekbone implants, or are those the real thing?)

It’s not all bad news in the economy: Abercrombie & Fitch is struggling. Huzzah.

If I want to get done in time to take a sprained-knee bike ride (with wraparound ice pack), I gotta get going. Have a good weekend, all.

When I was at the University of Michigan I had the pleasure of attending one of Ralph Williams’ lecture courses: The Bible as Literature, I believe. He’s a legendary presence at Michigan, and has been there long enough that his lecture on Job had to be moved to another building and held on a weekend, because so many parents wanted to come. Probably many of them had been his students, too.

Williams is retiring this year. He gave his final lecture this week:

“The world will not much care, nor long remember that which you gather as capital,” said Williams to the mostly college-age crowd. “But it will remember and celebrate the beauty you create.”

Words to live by in an ugly age.

I generally update this blog in the morning, when I’m useless anyway. I read the papers, start the coffee, drink the coffee, open the laptop and take my morning batting practice while I wait for the French Roast to work its magic. I generally try to be done by 10 a.m., and that’s when my day really begins, work-wise.

It turns out I’ve been doing it all wrong:

A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed important to “maybe appreciate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.

Adderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. (Such use is “off label,” meaning that it does not have the approval of either the drug’s manufacturer or the Food and Drug Administration.) College campuses have become laboratories for experimentation with neuroenhancement, and Alex was an ingenious experimenter. His brother had received a diagnosis of A.D.H.D., and in his freshman year Alex obtained an Adderall prescription for himself by describing to a doctor symptoms that he knew were typical of the disorder. During his college years, Alex took fifteen milligrams of Adderall most evenings, usually after dinner, guaranteeing that he would maintain intense focus while losing “any ability to sleep for approximately eight to ten hours.” In his sophomore year, he persuaded the doctor to add a thirty-milligram “extended release” capsule to his daily regimen.

This is the lede of a fascinating story making the rounds this week, from the New Yorker. Margaret Talbot’s piece on the off-label use of prescription stimulants and other ADHD drugs is both thrilling and terrifying, the idea that there could be real help for those of us who stumble through our lives unable to concentrate, even if we have to wheedle our doctors for it. Here’s the terrifying part:

Recently, an advice column in Wired featured a question from a reader worried about “a rising star at the firm” who was “using unprescribed modafinil to work crazy hours. Our boss has started getting on my case for not being as productive.”

Welcome to the new world. Please take your Adderall and get to work.

A few years ago I read a first-person essay by someone who’d taken Ritalin without a prescription, and described the effects as nothing short of revolutionary — the “better than well” sense of energy and focus that allowed the writer to not only work, but work better than he ever had in his life, to concentrate for long periods, to ignore distractions, to finish his novel. How easy it would be to become dependent on such a drug. How simple it would be to fit it into your life.

I can’t believe my generation spent all those years sitting around in smoky living rooms smoking pot, when we could have been swallowing Ritalin and accomplishing something.

(As you can tell, the French Roast is kicking in.)

It’s trendy to refer to our nation’s efforts against self-administered chemicals as “The War on Some Drugs,” or “The War on Some Classes of People Who Use Some Drugs.” You read stuff like this, and you see why it’s funny — because it’s true.

OK. It seems some of you are still back in yesterday’s thread, arguing about torture. Here’s a new starting place for that throwdown, a pretty fair-minded look at how, exactly, we determine what “high-value information” is and how it’s obtained.

If you’d rather take an easier road, torture drives Shep Smith to forget the cardinal rule of live broadcasting.

Meanwhile, why do people bring infants into homes with aggressive dogs? Why, why, why?

And now it’s 10 a.m., time to get to work. Fully engaged, but I could use some Ritalin.

The teacher set up a circuit course for us for yesterday’s weights class at my gym, with plans to push us through it three times. “Let’s warm up with some jumping jacks,” he said. So we commenced jumping.

A dozen jumps in, something happened in my left knee. It wasn’t the classic pop of a tendon or ligament tear, more like an alarming buckle — a feeling that whoops-something’s-going-somewhere-it-shouldn’t, immediately followed by it’s-back-where-it-belongs-but-there’s-going-to-be-hell-to-pay. Followed by numbness.

Well, hell. And this is my good knee.

It’s just a sprain, I’m sure, but it means days and weeks of not-being-right, and, as you might expect, the numbness predictably gave way to pain. I fished out the brace from my last adventure in this area, and I think the crutches may be called for, too. Also, ice, elastic bandages, elevation, and resentment.

This had to happen to me because the great gods of karma had kissed our work only an hour earlier — we got that grant we were in the running for. A Pulitzer couldn’t have thrilled me more, so of course I had to be punished. Good thing it wasn’t a really big grant — that would have meant tumors or amputation.

So, given that I’m gimpy, behind and otherwise distracted, how about some links and I’ll duck out early to change the ice pack?

Only in Detroit: The papers print these stories to give suburbanites something to screech about, I think. Woman goes into the city to buy a wig for her “cancer-stricken grandmother,” leaves her car 10 minutes, comes out to find her two Chihuahuas stolen. Commenter helpfully adds, they were probably stolen for dog-fighting bait. Way to make a lady feel better!

Gannett editor tells employees to reserve Facebook and Twitter for their private time. Two days ago, I F’booked a complaint about how stupid the site has become of late, and received a note from one of my still-employed ex-colleagues, who said she Facebooks for laffs while she waits to be laid off. So that’s why!

Looks like there’s a good chance the Supremes will rule strip-searching a 13-year-old girl for two Advil is just the price we have to pay to keep schools under administrators’ control. Joy.

Maureen Dowd, touring California and Silicon Valley, keeps lowering the bar. How does she manage?

Off to limp to the shower. And make some coffee.

It rained all day yesterday — hard, cold and sideways — and now something hard and needle-like is falling on the skylight. Could it be? Yes it could: Freezing rain/hail! And spring is delayed another day or two.

Don’t mind me. I always liked the feel of a nice snug straitjacket.

A few notes/clarifications/follows:

My comments about Susan Boyle got linked here and there, and reading the comments on other blogs, it seems there are some who believe my contempt was aimed at her, not at those surrounding her. Nothing could be further, etc., although I do wonder why anyone, let alone a nice Scottish virgin (say that phrase in a Scottish accent — it’s fun), would willingly climb between the sheets with Simon Cowell — talk about your deals with the devil. But obviously there aren’t many producers willing to take a chance on a woman like Boyle, and if she wanted to be heard outside her Scottish village, this was probably the only way it was going to happen.

No, my problem is with the people who treat her like some sort of sideshow, and in so doing reveal their not-particularly-hidden contempt for anyone who dares break the mold of what’s considered acceptable in our culture.

One more note: Not long ago I heard something on public radio about John Philip Sousa’s reaction to Mr. Edison’s infernal invention, the phonograph. He saw in an instant what it would lead to — the loss of music as an amateur pursuit, that’s what:

…when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely…

In Sousa’s time, music belonged to anyone who had the minimal discipline to learn it. Everyone — or, at least, far more people — could pick out a tune on the piano, favor the group with a song, play the fiddle at a Saturday-night dance. When entertainment was scarce, everyone entertained. You lent your talent, whatever it might amount to, to your church choir, your community band, your local musical society. When the music business amounted to the sale of sheet music, it was a far more democratic institution. Music was like the local plant life — unique in a particular place, shaped by circumstances and geography.

Boyle is, I think, far more rooted in this older world than ours. While she’s obviously influenced by the musical theater and other modern institutions, she seems to have one foot firmly planted in a time when being able to carry a tune meant you were somewhere on the scale from normal-to-gifted, not a superstar waiting to be discovered.

Of course her new Svengali will help her make a record. Here’s hoping it enables her to spend her remaining years wherever she wants, in Scotland or on a beach somewhere, singing like a canary just for the joy of it.

Also, I saw most, but not all, of HBO’s “Grey Gardens” the other night, and I have to say, I was impressed. I thought combining the Edies’ backstories with their degradation brought a note of empathy to the whole sad and squalid affair, and the acting, particularly Jessica Lange’s, was outstanding. Just the right combination of needy and calculating, mama spider sitting in her web waiting for the right moment to wrap her daughter up in it for good.

Needless to say, the wardrobe was fabulous. Why don’t we wear cloche hats anymore? They looked good on everyone.

Congratulations to the Detroit Free Press for their well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Unrelated: The other day I read about a prostitution ring in the metro area that relied on Craigslist, and the Free Press article said:

Sheriff Warren Evans charged Wednesday that Craigslist is major source of prostitution. He said the evidence will be sent to Chicago to bolster a federal civil case filed March 5 against the giant Internet firm by the Cook County sheriff.

“Giant internet firm.” I ask you. It is the truck that ran over our industry, and we don’t even know what color it is.

For what Wikipedia’s worth, the giant internet firm operates out of a nondescript house in San Francisco and has 28 employees.

And now I am off to mail the letter that will seal my summer in a nice package: I’m teaching a class this spring/summer term. At the university level, which I’m sure will give all you tuition-paying moms and dads pause. In internet journalism, at Wayne State. I’m as stunned as you are, but for now, I have to get my letter of offer back to them before the deadline. So I’m off, eh?

As I may have mentioned here a time or two hundred, I’m a retired equestrienne. One of these days, when I get a working scanner again, I’ll put some pix up of me in my riding togs, jumping fences on my very expensive steed, who was only expensive to me; among people who ride, he was little better than a plug. I rode with 14-year-old girls whose doctor daddies thought nothing of dropping a mid-five-figure sum on a well-trained thoroughbred for their darling daughters, and even that was on the cheap end, even then. At the elite levels, a five-figure sum is the monthly bill.

But never mind that. I did my time in the saddle, and while I never had the build or the talent or the budget to be a contender, I didn’t totally disgrace myself, and I learned a lot along the way. One of the things I learned was how to fall off.

Falling from a horse, in our culture, is made out to be far scarier than it is. In a movie, if a pregnant woman gets on a horse, she will be suffering a miscarriage within minutes. Bonnie Blue Butler only had to put the fence rails up too high to meet her tragic fate. And while there are a number of horrible accidents in riding competitions every year, they are exceptional. People with fancy horses tend to work them in riding rings with deep, soft footing, and what’s good for Dobbin’s legs is also good for your sorry ass when you land in it. Not that it doesn’t hurt, but unless you come off head-first or somehow land on the jump or the rail, chances are you’ll be just fine. The classic riding injuries are not Christopher Reeve’s broken neck but the big three — broken wrist and/or collarbone (from putting your hands out as the ground comes up to meet you), and cracked ribs.

Which brings us to Madonna, who either needs to toughen up or stay out of the saddle. I’ve dismounted more horses the hard way than she’s dismounted boyfriends, and never once did I have to go to the hospital — on a backboard, no less — for what turned out to be bruises. I thought she was Miss Super Fitness. Just get up, dust off your ass, lead your mount back to the block, get back on and finish the class. That’s how the tough girls do it.

My trainer didn’t coddle people who fell. She wasn’t a tyrant about it; a kid who was honestly terrified by the experience wasn’t forced back into the saddle at gunpoint or anything. But she never made a big fuss one way or another. It was like oopsy-daisy, everything OK? Fine, up you go and pick up a posting trot. As all parents know, the bigger the fuss you make over any injury, the more the injured party is frightened. However, I get the feeling that making a fuss over Madonna is pretty much the point of her existence, so I’m not surprised she was content to stay immobile on the ground while worried faces and EMTs peered down at her.

BTW, I was dumped because of “paparazzi,” too. I could never afford a good, well-trained horse, so I rode a couple of young, spooky ones. A barking dog, a loud muffler, a sudden hand gesture or windy day could turn them into the sorts of animals who disappear from underneath you and simultaneously reappear 10 feet to the left. You felt like Wily Coyote, running off the cliff. As I picked myself out of the dirt, I’d tell my trainer, “(X) spooked him.” She’d say, “Learn to stay on your horse.”

In Madge’s defense, however, one of my favorite lines from Thomas McGuane, as a character is riding the spooks out of a young stud colt: “By your mid-thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day it admits you.” True dat.

OK, some quick bloggage for, what else, a dreary Monday:

How fast food can kill you. It has nothing to do with cholesterol.

Dear Mr. President, this is how letters get to your desk.

It’s a good thing Berkeley has so many rich people. White roofs for all!

Why I keep fivethirtyeight.com bookmarked, even though the election’s over: For posts like this, about Minnesota’s Senate election.

Finally, since we seem to be heavy on the popculch today, to the next person who sends me the Susan Boyle video:

Stop it. I don’t care how much you were moved, wowed, whatevered. I don’t care. Don’t you realize how condescending this all is? Don’t you know how much you’re being played? Is there nothing Simon Cowell can’t make a buck from? You know why Susan Boyle is such a phenomenon? It’s not because she’s a great singer; how would anyone know? There are two recordings of her singing two songs extant in the world. No, Susan Boyle is a phenom because she’s ugly. Go ahead, say it: Ug-ly. Leave the nicer euphemisms — frumpy, dowdy — for the weak-willed. The bottom line is, when someone is ugly in our culture, we expect nothing good from them. The idea that a ugly woman could open her mouth and have something beautiful come out flummoxes us — how could she have been cultivating a love for music when she was neglecting her eyebrows and fitness routine so? Doesn’t she know our priorities? If a gorgeous woman had come out and given the exact same performance, you probably wouldn’t even know about it.

The next step, after celebrating Susan Boyle for being a fine singer, is a YouTube video of some street-looking black kid who steps to a microphone in a speech competition and delivers a perfect reading of a Shakespearean sonnet. Look, he’s so articulate! Just be aware.

Also, pleeze: Does anyone honestly believe the judges didn’t know what was coming? Do you think people make it onstage at shows like that without a single pre-performance screening? You think Simon didn’t know the camera was on him, red light lit, when he smiled? How dumb are we?

Pretty dumb, I’d say.