Goldberg and Orlean

Slate turns 10 this week, and we're publishing The Best of Slate: A 10^th Anniversary Anthology. In celebration of the book and the anniversary, we're publishing (or, rather, re-publishing) a selection of pieces from the anthology, including this article. This article was originally published Jan. 25, 1999. You can see a list of all the republished pieces, as well as everything else we are publishing in honor of the anniversary, here.

Good morning, Jeff-Jeff.

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I can't remember if you were going to wake me up or I was going to wake you up, but I'm already up so here I go. I actually woke up with a start because I was listening to my next-door neighbor's radio playing 'Morning Edition' on NPR and thought I heard the announcer say that Kim Delaney--you know, the sexpot cop on NYPD Blue--had died in her sleep. Then the announcer said Delaney was 109 years old and I thought: Either they have the world's most amazing makeup department on that show, or it wasn't Kim Delaney. Well, it wasn't. It was Sadie Delaney, one of those ancient African-American twin writers. And she was 109, and she barely looked 99, but she wouldn't have played a sexpot cop, no wheres, no how.

By the way, is this a numbered Intel chip? I feel.... unanonymous.

I have never seen a weirder and more horrible juxtaposition than this morning's front page of the Times--the story about Sierra Leone and the really horrific mutilation program going on, complete with a picture of a now-handless victim of the rebel forces--cheek by jowl with a teaser in the "inside" column announcing the first successful hand transplant in the U.S. Oh. My. God. I don't think there's a deeper meaning to draw from this other than: Life is ever stranger and stranger and the world is just weirder and weirder. And weirder.

I was happy to read that Lincoln Center decided not to put its priceless Jasper Johns painting in its garage sale, although I was going to offer a twenty-four piece Tupperware set in a barter deal. I have much more to say on the subject of what should happen to public art but I'll save that for post-coffee. I'm too fuzzy to be pithy yet.

Wake up, sleepyhead.

Yrs,

S

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