CNN: “Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.”

Well, let’s examine this, shall we? I’m not sure if self-centered college kids are especially damaging to American society. After all, the minute they leave college, unless they’re sitting on a savings account, they’ll have to get jobs and the student loan collectors will be on their asses in about nine months demanding payment. Faced with these financial realities, egos have a tendency to plummet.

And here’s Professor Jean Twenge describing the culprit: “Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism. By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube.”

You know, by its very name, the United States of America proves to be a harmonious nation, devoid of racism, sexism, and classism. By its very name, American Idol encourages the worship of flags and apple pie among the populace. By its very name, an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory permits a garden variety warehouse stocker to dissect personalities from the more noxious members of American society, stacking them with the overpriced doodads and baubles happily sold in a Target Greatland outlet. By her very name, Professor Jean Twenge makes my DNA (or my pants) feel inexplicable pangs of bullshit.

• Martin Amis: “I did have [a midlife crisis]. Sorry to inform you that you’re going to get one every decade after you’re forty, and it’s a different kind of crisis every time. You can read every novel ever written and they won’t prepare you for it. My midlife crisis was bang on schedule: mid-forties, divorce, terrible realizations about death.”
• Should authors respond to wrong-headed reviews? (via Maud)
• Podcasts, Haggis?
• The 2006 Nebula ballot. (via Gwenda)
• Jodi Picoult visits the school were her book was banned.
• Has Jonathan Littell scandalized France? My own statistics show that France is scandalized in some way every 32 minutes.
• Levi Asher talks with Danny Simmons.
• “Literary classics” now available on DVD.
• Rudy Wiebe has won the 2007 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
• Matthew Sharpe interviewed in Poets & Writers (via TEV)
• A new short story from Richard Russo at the Atlantic. Shockingly, it’s not behind a paywall. Has the Atlantic finally come to its senses? (via Dan Wickett)
• Teddy (via Other)
• Legos have changed.
• An honorary doc for Ozick. (via Orthofer)
• G.K. Chesterton gets the Golden Rule Jones Theater treatment.
• Mark Thwaite on Dawkins: “The God Delusion didn’t convince me at all, it just made me think Dawkins was a bit of a scary megalomaniac.”
• Scott Esposito: “Guess this is turning into ‘mean week’ here. Who will get dissed tomorrow?”

It was somewhere in the middle of the broadcast: a muted melange of cultural snippets that I apparently didn’t pay attention to, but that partisan puppets and closet conformists salivated over. I didn’t know. I was probably pouring scotch.

Now it’s spread across the YouTube. And I won’t mention it. Because I have a twitchy baseline phone that takes shitty pictures and does more or less what it sets out to do. Even when it cuts out. Even when it fails. What kind of spoilsports are we to declare more when only fifteen years ago we had a curly cord that attached into a wall or, if lucky and prosperous, a cordless? If you think I’m dropping half a gee for a whiz kid’s toy, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. If you think I’m going to buy into this because some kid in an editing room mashed up clips from popular films of people saying hello while the suits were burning bills left and right laughing their asses off because they had told you the same thing before, telling you to think different, you’ve really got ME laughing, pal. Boy, my boister’s dripping down the halls because the hell of it is that if I were about seven years younger, I’d probably fall for this shit.

I’m disappointed in geeks sometimes. Are there no cynics among the bunch? Do they casually accept everything without contemplating that baubles are often confused for advancement? Besides, this is a corporation we’re talking about here, not a gaggle of philanthropists. Ol’ Steve-O’s doing quite well because you swipe your credit cards without understanding what you’re doing. Hell, how many of these contraptions have been pre-ordered because these guys played into your uncanny love of the first person singular?

It’s not that I’m anti-fruit. (By now, you know who I’m talking about. So there’s no need for sobriquets.) The costermongers, on occasion, put out good wares. But I’m against this smelly buy now think less fervor, which has not only polluted the airwaves but taken up precious real estate on this alternative media thing we’ve got going here. Think different? A con man’s first point of order is to get you to believe the opposite.

Look, all I’m asking here is a healthy dose of skepticism. They’ve got some geeks drooling at the bell. Woof woof. It’s a shame, because many of these geeks are a lot smarter.