It’s the perfect bag to carry when you’re wearing your boyfriend’s signal red moose sweatshirt and your cloven-foot Siberian camo wedges.

So, there’s a question — a bad one, a hypothetical one — that I’m interested in regarding the Chris Brown and Rihanna redux of remixes and whatever exists beyond the surly bonds of autotune:

If Rihanna and Chris Brown have another violent episode, what percentage of blame will she be awarded in the arena of social consensus?

I don’t want to know the actual answer at all, and I hope we never find out. But it’s a question I keep circling, because this is so clearly a bad idea, Rihanna and Chris Brown dealing together. It’s a complex set of supply and demand curves that smudge the bounding boxes around personal agency (Rihanna) and 2012′s rote cycles of superficial communication (Brown). A very grim game of Town Mouse, Country Mouse, basically.

On that demand (or supply, it doesn’t really matter), Rihanna. No one deserves to get beaten, and I’m absolutely not saying she did, does, or will–please do not mistake me. But, what do we all do when someone insists on barreling forward with what is so obviously a terrible decision? If we were talking about a driver who is hit by a second, drunk driver, but isn’t wearing his seatbelt–the drunk driver is to blame, of course, but what the hell do we do about the first guy?

The core story with Brown and Rihanna and in the Huguely trial is very base, very basic: The angry young drunk who beats up his girlfriend, and in Huguely’s case, beats her to death. The improper spaces of it all–the base and the basic don’t sound right in a Lamborghini or a college apartment–flip those from rote Metro section news items into something broad and arresting. Beauty wrecked, and brutal aggression where it shouldn’t be, like finding a dead animal in your kitchen.

Compounding this knife slash of a news story is Brown’s refusal to demonstrate any kind of even cursory guilt or remorse (the supply curve). This doesn’t follow the children playing house approach we’ve taken to the public apology, which elevates Brown’s volatility, really, because if he can’t follow the most routine true blue procedure, something really must be the hell wrong with him, right? But Brown’s refusal to comply also acts like a hurricane here, picking up all kinds of stuff: This a person who appears beyond rehabilitation and redemption, and thus is a kind of vector of violent petulance–this is a bad guy, an evil guy maybe. Evil’s a jokey word in a 2012 context, but if you accept absolutes in the world, Chris Brown might qualify. He’s unchanged, unchanging, he’s going to lead with, “Girl I want to fuck you right now.”

What’s so frustrating and compelling — almost sickening — about Brown and Rihanna is this idea that it’s something in their infrastructure that dictates he won’t apologize, and she…whatever she’s doing.

What made the Whitney Houston story especially depressing was its lack of the surreal–Houston was a drug addict, who fell from ludicrous heights, in a crushingly normal way. It’s the base and basic of her decline. But even she said it 20 years ago: ”I am nobody’s angel. I can get down and dirty. I can get raunchy.” It was right there in the infrastructure, waiting.

So, what do you do with the girl who walks right back into the hurricane? Right now, you can’t blame her, and you can’t abandon her, and you can’t just wait out the storm. A lot of dead ends in this story.

Everyone’s written eight million words about it, but I wanted to say my crazy sappy peace anyway in three bullet points:

• The last thirty minutes of Chuck were just like the best of season two — the stakes were high, the comedy close at hand, and the ambiance the old blend of cheesy, seriously romantic, and bittersweet. If you ever watched it back in the day, watch the last four episodes, you’ll love it…
• …although part of that derives from something very personal. Unequivocally, my greatest fear is Alzheimer’s. I don’t think I need to explain why. For Sarah Walker, a character with whom I always identified (minus the Maxim-ness), to lose five years of time knifed me between the ribs. And to be promised the return of her memory seems significant beyond this dumb show we all loved…
• …But I believe in the bittersweet ending, anyway. I don’t think the Disney kiss brings her memories back. I think they flow back to her in time, and I think Sarah Walker gets a very awesome chance — that is, to become the woman she was again, and to fall in love with Chuck anew. Even if what was before can’t quite be recreated, the promise of that gradual happy ending prevails.

I loved that dumb show a lot.

If it’s a little small for you, the caption there is:

As Angelina cuts Shiloh’s hair shorter than ever, Brad breaks down worrying that his little girl will be ridiculed.

(Written on Brad Pitt’s shoulder) “From dolls to dinosaurs”

Oh God no, she’s well on her way to becoming a ridiculed lesbian who trains dinosaurs to rip the heads off dolls and also the heads of the little girls who carry them!

Yes, she’ll probably be ridiculed for being a tomboy at some point in her schooling days — she’ll probably be ridiculed anyway because her parents are very famous — but that is a function of growing up. She’ll probably also hit an extra snag in the rough patch of the middle school era, where there is a skill set of girl stuff (nail polish, sleepovers, the general fit of clothes, etc.) you miss out on if your friends skew male. But, there is a hierarchy of weird children out in the world, and frequently, the weirdest among them don’t really care that other kids make jokes. If they did, they’d modify the offending behavior.

I can name you the memorably weird kids from elementary school — and I’m sure you could do the same. If we went to elementary school together, I’m probably on the list, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt-style:

True story: The only time I’ve ever cried to get out of something in my entire life is when my parents wanted me to go to cotillion in the fourth grade. At the mention of “white gloves,” I started crying right there in Charley’s Place, the restaurant that preceded J. Gilbert in McLean. White gloves! The horror, the horror. At the time, my friend Sean told me that his parents bribed him with an N64. My parents took a German approach only slayed by tears.

Anyway, this is not an adult. This is a little kid. If she wants to play with her brothers and build forts and play with dinosaurs, who the hell cares? That sounds awesome. If she’s 26 and she’s idling around, playing dinosaurs, then you’ve got a problem. But this sounds pretty normal for a kid.

The insinuation, one supposes, is that this is some example of Angelina Jolie conditioning her child to be transgendered — or at least not correcting course where a Good Woman would. Indulging the eccentric, and so forth. What’s the alternative? Forcing the girl into dresses and taking her dinosaurs away? That always turns out so well. (Also, WTF, girls can’t play with dinosaurs now? Why do dinosaurs Hate Women?)

When I was in kindergarten, my teacher pulled my mother aside and told her she needed to stop letting me dress myself (lots of striped t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers) and ensure I made friends with girls (my best friend was a boy), because once the second grade hit, boys and girls stopped being friends and I wouldn’t have any. Needless to say, because my mother is awesome, she did not take well to that information and told her off.

Now, there’s some truth to that horrible advice: Anything resembling social success eluded me for a very long time, as it did for a lot of those very weird kids. But most of them turned out fine, and in a lot of ways, better than some of the other more normal ones.

As my mother has also said frequently kids with mohawks and kids with dyed hair:

It’s just hair.

IT WILL BE FINE, LIFE & STYLE.

So I’m working on this well-read thing, with the reading and so forth. The goal this year is 30 books. I’m already behind and reading Anna Karenina; expect failure. Also, I’m only about 150 pages in, but I really think it’s going to work out for Anna and Vronsky! It seems promising!

But I thought I would account for the stuff I read last year — one of my favorite bloggers ever, 50 Books (now retired), used to post capsule reviews of books she’d read, and even now, years later, when I finish a classic or a book written before that blog ended, I’ll go over and see what she said and what people said in the comments. This is sort of born of that. Onwards:

Appendix A: Recommendations. A few weeks ago, I posted a best of 2011 lineup of links and follows, which seemed to go over well, so here’s most of that (in no particular order):

1. Ace of Spades reviews Bad Teacher
2. Joe Posnanski of SI on Jeff Francoeur: French and Hope
3. “Many people, such as me, have the burden of coming back, and fading away, forgotten. Your son will never be lost this way, he will live forever.”
4. Michael Chabon on reading Huck Finn to his kids and dealing with the word “nigger”: The Unspeakable in Its Jammies
5. Sarah Miller at the Awl: Why Emma Watson Really Left Brown
6. Megan McArdle on the worst inequality: The Tyranny of the Meritocracy
7. Leon Wolf on the terrifying reality of American politics: Free Ponies Will be the Death of America
8. A journalist on 25 years of knowing George W. Bush: Dubya and Me
9. Interview: Justin Timberlake in Playboy

Appendix B: Recriminations. These are the books I finished in 2011:

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Let’s be real: The Fountainhead’s appeal is entirely a hot relationship. Outside of Dominique and Roark (and it is a hot relationship, she did pull that off), the entire book is about modern architecture, weirdly expository monologues sometimes about architecture, and trials about architecture. While I actually have a lot of fondness for that topic, in the same way that despite its cherished status, Pride & Prejudice is actually about a pretty nerd and a rich elitist falling in love, modern architecture isn’t exactly a national sweet spot of nostalgia. Nevertheless, critics who question the central premise of it all — a selfish to thine ownself the 1% and the 1% in spirit — should rewind on that Steve Jobs Stanford speech everyone so loves to quote. It’s kind of terrible advice, but for a few people. Anyway, in general: The dialogue’s not very well written! Very awkward and a touch removed from reality. Especially Ellsworth Toohey’s endless monologues. A+ for Dominique/Roark, though.

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

Wrote about here. People forget Bowen was good (and a boozy Edmund Burke fan, too), and she really has a crazy deft hand with perspective shifts. She breaks off some lines like this, “The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet—when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.” Unfortunately, this one features a 16-year-old girl who acts like an eight-year-old and reads as possibly mentally challenged by 2012 standards. If you like The New Girl…

Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain

Read in advance of the HBO miniseries, which I didn’t watch after reading the reviews and kind of the book itself, to be honest. It’s very much a domestic portrait of a woman who has a borderline incestuous infatuation with her sociopath daughter, and frustrating as hell to read, because you just want to be like, Mildred, Jesus Christ.

Macbeth

I somehow missed reading “Macbeth.” For an English major, I have some giant holes in my Shakespeare knowledge, so I’m trying to work through what I hadn’t read (“King Lear” is on deck). Here is the sad part: I actually read this so I could retroactively mock Bella Swan for writing what sounded like an annoying ass paper about it. Anyway, it’s good! Two notes: First, one of the things I like about having the Norton Anthology is they always give you the history of the source material for the plays; apparently, the source material has Duncan as a young and feeble ruler, and Macbeth going on to have a great rule for a decade. Which, I suppose, puts The Social Network in slightly better regard for history. Two, Ross is hilariously awful at delivering bad news. He first tells MacDuff that his family was doing awesome hey nonny nonny, and then is like “Oh, actually, gotta tell you something: jk they’re all dead.” Then in the final scene, when Siward’s son has been killed by Macbeth, he informs Siward, who actually has to ask, “My son is dead?” or something like it, that’s how poor a job he does at explaining the situation.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

Very funny and awesome, and loved by all who have read it. Wrote about it here, but my favorite parts continue to be the college stories and the ones about her father. Also, the stylist’s assistant will be a chic twenty-year-old Asian girl named Esther or Agnes or Lot’s Wife.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Everybody says this, but: It’s a pop culture drive-by shooting that The Hunger Games gets grouped with Twilight. Collins is so superior a writer to Meyer, and that book is so much better conceived of and executed than Twilight. HG, however, has a really interesting appeal: It’s a book with a female protagonist, written by a woman, but it’s still very popular with guys, including middle school guys (for a quick example: my former boss’s son loved the books and so did his friends). That’s…different.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

I should have loads to say about this book, but I don’t really, except to say that it’s excellent and unique, and but for The Age of Innocence, my favorite book I read in 2011. It compares well to The Master and Margarita for its delightful intricacy and the seamless logic of the insanity at hand.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

The story of the last, peevish American ambassador to Germany before WWII, his kind of hilariously slutty daughter, and the only book I’ve ever paused to think, “PLEASE DON’T SLEEP WITH HITLER, GIRL” before turning the page. I preferred it to Devil in the White City, as the latter’s start-stop alternating structure frustrated me; here, Larson focuses on one time period, within one family, so if it’s not as original, it’s more cohesive (to me).

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

I have a really bad habit of writing part of a blog post and not finishing it, and here is one on this book:

Weiner’s Troubles could only have happened in a post-2000 world, and even then that’s generous. I mean, the sins are the same, and so forth, but when Paul Revere sent a woman a dirty picture, he had to draw it himself, and ride all night just to deliver the message. I don’t want to belabor the point, but the newness of it is interesting.

That makes it an odd companion to a book written 90 years ago. But Wharton’s writing has a weird transcendence, where it retains a modern analogue at all times, and delivers insight where you expect stodginess. She has a story called “The Other Two” that’s about a really sly ho who’s been married, now, thrice, and whose two ex-husbands live on — there’s no quaint antiquity about it. Wharton could have written it in 1970. “Age of Innocence” differs, of course, in that Wharton is very concerned with the oldness of things, against the newness of 1920.

Wharton works a kind of love triangle — it’s a very…isosceles love triangle — to carve up pre-WWI Old New York society, and to examine the intricate chain of unspoken duties and falsehoods. The revelation here is sort of anti-climactic with the context in the latter half of the book, but the way the pieces fold together into this dinner set piece is amazing:

[dinner scene cut because it's long but it's really good go read it]

Wharton caps “Age of Innocence” with an epilogue, set 26 years after the bulk of the book. There, she enlists the Archers’ eldest son as modernity, so Archer can debate with himself what it is that’s changed. He settles on this: That the youth meet fate as an equal, and something that can be fought and conquered, rather than inevitability and its weight.

The inherent newness of the Weiner scandal sets me up right there because here: The immediacy of the social media world requires you to believe on some level that you sit across from fate. If you can see reality move, then you have to believe your ability to affect it a little bit. Add to that the impulse to share rather than withhold, and

…that’s where I stopped writing. After Ethan Frome, I always expect Edith Wharton to plow right through your heart with the misery express, but Age of Innocence has a very lovely, very bittersweet ending — so don’t let the threat of despair ward you off.

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Wrote about here. Don’t get into it there, but one of those true Great Visuals books, where you have a lasting vision of the world therein. The book’s built around the seasons and the girl, and I have the clearest picture of both, sort of Norman Rockwellian HD, colored in with Crayola.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Another Missed It Somehow book. I had this in my Sandusky-Paterno post but I scrapped it:

There’s a part where Josef K., the main guy, is in his office, and he hears something in the closet, opens it and finds his original arresting police officers getting beaten for screwing up something and it escalates and escalates and they’re asking him for help, until he closes the door and goes away, and then later — it might even be a different day — he opens the door again, and they’re exactly in the SAME positions as before, still begging for his help. The Sandusky situation reminds me of that — like how the hell did the people who knew just…ignore it?

While the ending is surreal by subtraction, Kafka assembles a series of set pieces like the closet built to disorient. Some of them creeped me the hell out, And Then There Were None-style, chief among them when he sees the lawyer and it’s dark and sketchy, anyway, and then the lawyer points out the guy who’s been sitting in the dark corner the entire time.

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Philips

If you are an English major, or English major adjacent who hated reading Shakespearean plays (but has a decent working knowledge of them) and also loves some good metafiction, this is your book. It has a fake Shakespearean play in it (like, for real, Philips wrote a whole play, it’s at the end of the book), and a lot of the plot elements function like modern-day Shakespearean comedy elements (twins and so forth). I loved it, but you may not.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Wrote about here. Still great. Still recommended. Much like the visuals of My Antonia, I keep circling back around, “I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.”

Appendix C: Ongoing failure. Two books I spent a lot of time reading in 2011, but didn’t finish because whatever, I’ll finish them: Henry James’s Wings of the Dove (I actually started reading it in 2009 on the flight to Prague and will eventually finish, possibly from hell), and The Master and Margarita (which is awesome, my fall just got kind of busy and I lost momentum).

Appendix D: Future. On the list for 2012 after Anna: Triumph of the City, Pulphead, some John le Carre, Middlemarch (another on the unfinished list), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (it’s in my sweet James M. Cain sampler book). Also trying to close some major nonfiction gaps because, true life, I’ve virtually read no Hitchens, Didion, or anyone else. The only George Orwell book I’ve ever read cover-to-cover? Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which makes me one of the 12 people living who has.

I’ll just make this big, after 9,342,204 words about what I’ve been reading: What are you reading this year?

I’m deploying all my Google Fu to try and find the original study here, but MTV Networks apparently hides their studies in a special, special box only accessible if you’re a fair person, which I am not. Anyway, in this piece by Patrick Evans at Media Post on the social media accessibility of Gen Y, there’s an interesting slice:

According to a recent MTV Networks study, 70% of Gen Y consumers said they’d figure out how to make things fair if they feel a company is being unfair with them. The network found that the group as a whole demands fairness, transparency and clear, consistent rules from brands. This often means brands get bombarded with negative Facebook posts or tweets when it increases shipping charges or makes a decision a majority of its consumers doesn’t like.

Can’t figure out how to do a Google search, but IT’S LATTER-DAY ROBIN HOOD TIME B when Netflix changes their pricing model. I wish I could find the study, actually, because I’d like to investigate the phrasing. This passage, when you give a good hard look, offers a terrifying possibility: “makes a decision a majority of its consumers doesn’t like.” Is that what unfairness is now? When a change is made that people don’t like?

And let’s double-down. Here is your intro post for Gen Y, this sentence: “The network found that the group as a whole demands fairness, transparency and clear, consistent rules from brands”? Fairness, transparency, and rules! I know I love to reference this Don Peck Atlantic piece, but the echoes are there:

Ron Alsop, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace, says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in many 20-somethings. They’re used to checklists, he says, and “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving.” Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, “need almost constant direction” in the workplace. “Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.”

BUT THESE ARE THE RULES. It’s not that these are bad things, of course. Transparency, fairness, and clear expectations are good qualities in a business. But if one of the three tenets is built on something so ephemeral as mass good feelings, the structural integrity of the whole thing seems questionable.

Obviously, this is not a cooking blog, nor will it become one, because my evening palette more or less consists of a lean piece of broiled chicken or fish, a steamed vegetable, and possibly some rice. Eat Boring: A Primer, etc. But, per the fine people at Fine Cooking, I’ve learned how to make awesome sweet potato fries.

The trick is egg whites. The protein crisps the fry. All right, so you need:

• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 3 egg whites (crack the shells in half, then move the yoke from shell to shell over a bowl to catch the whites)
• Cooking spray
• A sweet potato (no kidding)

Preheat the oven to 425. Peel and chop up yo’ potato into fries — the shortcut for this is to cut the potato into a rectangular block of potato, then into slices, then to fries. I like a thinner fry myself, so I go about 1/4-inch by 1/4-inch. So you’ve got your fries.

Whisk the cumin, paprika, and salt into the egg whites. Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray. Dunk the fries in the mixture and then line them up on the baking sheet, like so:

Put the fries in the oven for eight to ten minutes. Take them out, flip them with a spatula, sprinkle some kosher salt while they’re hot. Put them back in the oven for another, like, six to ten minutes. And you’re ready to go!

From the Lisa Frank ‘Equus’ line, this pattern is “Natty, Faded Ghost of Seabiscuit.”

I am still reviewing it for The A.V. Club. It’s not really getting better, which is fine, but I wasted a good joke on it and I wanted to record that for posterity:

While we’re there, let me throw something at you: Adam is The Secret Circle’s Bonnie. He’s more or less an old school ghost with two holes cut out of a sheet, except instead of a sheet, it’s a wet blanket. And he looms in whatever plot he’s in, dragging it down with his clammy blanket hands, telling it things are too dangerous.

Adam is played with peevish obstinacy by Thomas “John Connor” Dekker. Somehow he manages to sound like he is correcting for an accent more than the Australian actress on the show.

In advance of the March 25 return of Mad Men, Matt Weiner said something interesting to Alan Sepinwall about the state of the throne:

WEINER: And then the other thing is, and it really kept coming up — the line is in the show in episode 3 — is, “When is everything going to get back to normal?”

SEPINWALL: And it’s not.

WEINER: Yeah. This is normal. And I feel like that’s the way it is right now. That’s what I feel: we are undergoing such tremendous change. Technological, social, our perception of ourselves as a country, our perception of each other. The country at one time feels like a melting pot and as culturally diverse as ever, and at the same time, I don’t know what period I’m looking to, but I don’t feel like my feet are on the ground. What you realize is, this is the way it is.

Right? A sort of surreal displacement? You could roll with any example you wanted, but for a timely one how about this Politico-Facebook deal?

It’s all happening during the lead-up to the next primary, being held Jan. 21 in South Carolina. Every time a Facebook user posts about a candidate, Facebook’s team will pick it up and determine whether the mention expresses favorable sentiment about the candidate. To do that, they’ll be armed with new software that researchers use to determine opinion from text. They’ll analyze every mention from Thursday until the primary. In turn, they’ll hand that data over exclusively to Politico, whose journalists will add insight and commentary.

While we all know that Facebook is like this, ever more do they find ways to remind you that they walk through the internet’s walls, in ways you can’t envision before they do. And how can you, as the individual, compete? You can’t, really. It’s a new reality of sorts that I can’t really avoid.

If you’ve ever been drift fishing, usually you mark off where you start with some kind of buoy (my cousins use old bleach bottles with weights attached). That’s how I’ve been thinking about the Cultural State of Things — the dissonance of being anchored down and floating and bobbing at the same time, until we either become accustomed to where we are or things change completely.

Jeffrey Eugenides kind of hit on that in The Marriage Plot, except on the subject of medicating manic depression:

Doctors counseled patience. They insisted that the body would adjust. And, to an extent, it did. After a while, you’d been on the drugs so long that you couldn’t remember what it felt like to be normal. That was how you adjusted.

So we’re all empty, manic depressive Clorox bottles. Have a good rest of your week!