When I was a kid, “Mad Magazine” was the magazine you brought home from the drugstore if you wanted to annoy mom. It was just off-color enough, just gross enough, just funny enough, that a twelve-to-fourteen-year-old would find it irresistable. My favorite part of the magazine was always the margin doodles by Sergio Aragonés, whose tiny illustrations were somehow more satisfying that full-sized comic strips. And then there was “Cracked.” “Cracked” was the also-was, a publication that tried so hard to ape the style and format of “Mad” that it even poached various “Mad” staffers over the years. “Cracked” was never as Read More

In my most recent adventure I ran into “Keith.” Keith was a 44-year-old man, but was in better shape than most 23-year-olds. Riped, handsome, and a participant of jiujitsu, I felt it was more of an honor I met him than he met me. But after much conversation and realizing he and I both made some of the same disastrous mistakes men our age did, he said something common, but profound that I really didn't appreciate until now: “Had I known today what I know now when I was 19 the world would be ….blabbity blah blah blah.” I had heard that refrain Read More

Yet another remembered-rape story appeared in the Washington Post on Dec 18th. Headlined “It Should Never Be Too Late to Tell Your Story of Rape,” it was written by Abigail Hauslohner, one of the paper's own reporters. Hauslohner claimed that almost a decade and a half ago, as a teen, she was raped by a young man she'd considered a close friend: I went to visit my friend — I'll call him “X” — at his college campus. I saw X as a goofy but caring, older-brother type; we'd overlapped in high school and had a platonic and confiding sort of friendship. Read More