… is online here.

Regarding the first question, I was somewhat relieved to read my response. (My deadlines are four weeks in advance, so I don’t see what I’ve written for a while. I mean, obviously, I could go back and read my own files, but for some reason I’m superstitious about not doing that.) This is the first letter I’ve ever answered that was sent to me by regular mail — I only get one or two real postal letters a year, compared to a dozen or so e-mail questions a week — and I wish I could scan the entire thing and post it for you, so you could truly get a sense of the “Miss Lonelyhearts” quality of it: written on lined paper, in a shaky print, with the word “stump” mentioned in nearly every sentence. (I had to edit it down.) That feels like a violation of privacy of the writer, though.

Anyway, I’ve never before written a column in a white heat of emotion and sent it off without looking at it a second time. Which I did with this one, because it hit me so hard. And I’m glad to see that now, with a cooler head, I am proud of what I wrote.

UPDATE: And on a lighter note, I obviously wrote this column before the current season of “Lost” debuted. Having now seen it, I stand even more strongly by my advice that people deserve to have it explained to them in their native language.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a brilliant post up about weight loss, the American food industry, environmentalism, racism, and stuff. He’s one of my favorite bloggers anyway, and this post exemplifies why; in essence, he’s trying, as always, to get his readers to look at the bigger picture and not point fingers at individuals. This is a huge part of what I try to do with etiquette, and what part of my whole “epidemic of rudeness” post was about — looking at systemic causes for why people behave the way they do, instead of just running around shrieking “Narcissism! Internet! Mindlessness! Selfish bastards!”

You really have to read the whole thing to understand how he gets from low-fat Oreos to racism, but here’s two key paragraphs:

But more than that, I understand enough to be wary of inveighing against people who eat at McDonalds–or even McDonald’s itself–of harshly interrogating the morality of flesh-eaters (I am, of course, among them.) It’s not that any of this is wrong per se, so much as it’s limited. When you’re constantly naming people for their sins of consumption, it’s very hard to get them to act against a system of consumption. More than that, it often misses the point of how hard it is to pull oneself out of the Matrix, and thus underestimates the Matrix, in that it assumes we can win by yelling.

Likewise, I think in my best writing here, in the writing that really matters, I’ve worked to steer us away from the reductive parlor game of “Is this/he/she racist?” It’s useful to a point, but ultimately self-serving. It underestimates our demons and it underestimates how an entire system warped nearly every institution in this country, and continues to warp it to this day. What I’d rather we us understand is some sense of the big system, some sense of American white supremacy as mechanized racism.

You might disagree with some of his specific points, but the overall thrust of his argument is, I think, profound.

(Also, while we are on the topic of the U.S. food system, did anyone catch “Parks & Recreation” last night? Yes, it tripped some of my body-acceptance triggers, but I thought for a sitcom, it did a damn good job of showing some of the problems of our current food system and legitimate points of view from both the liberal and libertarian sides. And all that along with a B-plot featuring an iPod/Roomba hybrid called “DJ Roomba” and a C-plot of April becoming disenchanted with her two gay boyfriends. No small accomplishment, that.)

“The Lion in Winter”:

The terrier in winter:

… in the matter of prematurely declaring anything the “Most X Ever.” Because something else will surely come along that’s even X-ier, sometimes sooner than you think. You liked Igor, the coroner’s assistant? Check out the Demon Sheep!

(Also, do watch Rachel Maddow’s commentary. She’s so much more polite than I am — I can think of a lot of ways to pronounce the acronym “FCINO” besides the refined “fa-SEE-no” that she chose!)

Boo!

I’ve been working this week on editing the page proofs of my boss’s book for my Harvard Business School job. (Hence the lack of long, navel-gazing, rambling posts.) Whew! It’s a lot longer than my book was, I’ll tell you that. It’s a good one, though — and already up on Amazon. Check it out. Fundamentally, it is about what happens when people change jobs: Do they continue to succeed? How can you know if a job change is a good idea or not? If you are a manager, is it better to hire outside talent or invest the time and money to develop your own workers into superstars?

An article on rudeness featuring an interview with me. I love being interviewed by Tanya — we always have such interesting conversations! I hope to get to meet her in person and off the record sometime.

I’ll be chatting from noon-1pm Eastern time here. Come by! Or read the transcript afterward. Chats are always fun and frequently go in the oddest directions.

From Jezebel:

I was raised in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and manners were drilled into me. I see kids [on the spectrum] today that have no manners. That’s going to hurt them. You can’t punish a child who is acting out because of sensory overload. But it’s unacceptable to see kids throwing things and slapping people. I see kids with Asperger’s [a mild form of autism] who can’t hold a job because they are constantly late. Teach kids to use an alarm clock. This is common sense and sometimes we forget about common sense. Autism is used too much as an excuse for bad behavior.

I saw a preview on HBO for the upcoming movie about Ms. Grandin’s life and it looks phenomenal. We don’t have HBO but I’m determined to get a copy of it somehow.

In the epic discussion of rudeness on the boston.com blog, a number of people mentioned changes in the political/media culture as responsible for a degradation of public discourse. I don’t allow partisan politics on that site, but talking about general trends is fine, and I agreed with many of the commenters.

In that spirit, may I present the most remarkable political smear ad of all time. Yes, it is real; it’s for the coroner’s seat in New Orleans:

I’ll let you pause for a moment to take that in.

I majored in theater as an undergraduate. You know the actor who played Igor probably got his theater degree at Louisiana State or some such, dreamed of playing Mister Mistoffolees on tour, maybe getting to do the one-man version of “Santaland Diaries” someday, or even Shakespeare … I hope for his sake that his hopes and dreams were already crushed before this happened. It sounds harsh of me, I know, but I am cruel only to be kind.

So last night I was having a nice cup herbal tea before bed, and the teabag tag read, “Never utter a wrong word, think a wrong thought or wish a wrong wish.”

What was particularly odd about this was not that they omitted the all-important Oxford comma, but that this was from a box of “Kava Stress Relief Tea.”

Because nothing relieves my stress quite like being pre-emptively accused of thoughtcrime.

(For the history of the teabag-tag wars, go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, and here. Yes, someday I will collect these all into one big post! Today is not that day, however.)

Sunday’s column dealt with the rude questions and comments addressed to parents of only children. I got a letter today from the mother of another only child, who suggested this answer to the “When are you having another” question: “We’re waiting to see how this one turns out first. Ask us when he’s 18.”

I suppose the ConductMom has more or less decided how I’ve turned out, and it’s not as though anyone is pushing her to give me a little brother or sister at this point, finally. But it did remind me of another thing she used to say — when I was a child, people often asked, “But aren’t you afraid she’ll be spoiled?” upon learning I had no siblings. To which my mother would reply, “We were afraid she was, but it turns out she always smells that way.”

You know I had to get it from somewhere.

I have an old-fashioned “boom box” in the downstairs floor of our apartment, and recently the CD-playing function of it gave up its electronic ghost. I suppose the ultimate thing to do will be to get speakers for my iPod and download all my CDs onto that, but in the meantime, I’m rediscovering my tape collection, in all its Talking-Headed, Julee Cruise-ing, Sting-ing, Breakfast Clubbed glory, and let us remember, Tom Waits for no man.

What did you listen to “back in the day” and do you still listen to it? Do you listen primarily to the music you learned to love in your teens and 20s, or do you continue to find new things? What’s the most embarrassing album in your collection? When you listen to the music of “back in the day” can your critical functions actually engage, or does the nostalgic emotion overwhelm you?

That was one set of things that my little technical mishap got me thinking of. The other is something that’s been on my mind a lot, as the cultural conversation turns more and more to frugality and reducing waste, both for financial reasons and the good of the planet. Mr. Improbable and I do try to live a relatively non-consumerist lifestyle, although that makes it sound much more like an Official Ideological Position than we experience it — on a day-to-day basis, we simply try to do buy the cheapest versions of things when that makes sense and invest money in the “good version” when that makes sense; do our research on major purchases; take good care of the stuff we’ve got; and only buy things that we really need or want, and not for the sake of keeping up with the Joneses.

We do pretty well spending by our values, I think, except when it comes to technology. It seems are always having to get a new laptop, or digital camera, or some damn thing or other, because of compatibility issues. A hundred years ago, your mule died, you’d have to get a new mule, but you wouldn’t have to also get a new harness and plow because your old one was incompatible with Mule 2.0.

I’m enjoying channeling my 80s self and bopping around the apartment to Cyndi Lauper while I clean or pay bills. But sooner or later the tape player function will die, too, and then what? It feels that there’s no option that doesn’t lead straight to premature obsolescence and waste.

Does this bug you, too?

Or, you can just talk about the most embarrassing music you listen to. We can go heavy or light today. It’s a Monday. Your call.