From a wildly imaginative meditation on who Lolita would be at age fifty, to a send-up of the warning labels on medicine bottles, these pieces, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker, hilariously and intelligently skewer the topics at hand.

Contents:

• A Public Apology
• Writing is Easy!
• Yes, in My Own Backyard
• Changes in the Memory over Fifty
• Mars Probe finds Kittens
• Dear Amanda
• Times Roman Font Announces Shortage of Periods
• Schrödinger's Cat
• Taping My Friends
• The Nature of Matter and its Antecedents
• The Sledgehammer: How it Works
• The Paparazzi of Plato
• Side Effects
• Artist Lost to Zoloft
• How I Joined Mensa
• Michael Jackson's Old Face
• In Search of the Wily Filipino
• Bad Dog
• Hissy Fit
• Drivel
• I Love Loosely
• Lolita at Fifty
• A Word from the Words