New Yorker gets Buzzed

Noah Baumbach wrote the funniest thing I've seen in print in a long time for The New Yorker. The piece is called Buzzed and is a first-person narrative from a bee on cocaine.

Check it out. It's a MUST READ. I read it aloud to my roommate. I suggest you do the same thing if you can find someone around to listen to you.

Baumbach's name may be familiar to you. He's the screenwriter behind The Squid and The Whale.

Here's the intro, explaining what inspired the piece:

To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain.

The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.
—The Times.

Oh, my God, get over here . . . hurry . . . come on come on come on. Taste this nectar, taste it, taste it. . . . Slurp. . . . Is that not, is that not the best fucking thing you’ve ever had? Like nectar of the fucking Gods!

Read on.

My baby has found a home

Well, summer plans are set. I'll be splitting my time between Above The Law and True/Slant. I'm very excited about this. And about not having to go to classes.

I feel a juvenile urge to chant "No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks." Except I heart my professors at NYU and have already sought them out since the semester ended. I visited Meryl Gordon down at the courthouse -- she's covering the Astor Trial for Vanity Fair. And Ted Conover met up with the small group of students in our Portfolio class last week for dinner at expensive-vegan-fare-West-Village restaurant, Gobo.

Speaking of Portfolio, back in February, I blogged the birth announcement of my blog for the course: The Not-So Private Parts. Well, my little blog baby has grown up and found a new home. It's now living at True/Slant.

Check out my musings on the erosion of privacy in the digital age, and sign up to follow me!

The Not-So Private Parts [True/Slant]

"Summer break" and a Supreme message

Yesterday, I turned in my last piece of the second semester and am now officially on "summer break." So far, it looks like summer break will involve lots of working. In this economy, that's great news for me!

Last week was an exciting one. After having written that story on the Fordham dossier on Justice Antonin Scalia, I called the Supreme Court to see if Justice Scalia might have a comment on the story.

He did!

He sent me a message through the Supreme Court's public information officer. We published it here. David Lat, ATL's formidable founder, is out of the country at the moment so it's not possible to ask him if this is a first for Above The Law (getting an exclusive quote from a Supreme Court Justice).

It's definitely a first for me.

Justice Scalia Responds to Fordham Privacy Invasion! [Above The Law]