Welcome back, Friday lynx.

Greetings from Aaron’s futon, where I luxuriate in the scorched neurons and sleep-deprived biliousness of late morning in New York City. Obviously, I couldn’t just get in last night and curl up with a cup of chamomile and Right Ho, Jeeves. Back in New York means back in old habits, and I was drinking seven-dollar beers and dramatizing the interior lives of weird strangers until the wee hours of the morning. Now I am tired. Today is Friday, and the charms of the familiar remain as potent as ever. Won’t you clench your stomach and lurch back into the groove with me?

If you are from Iowa and have Facebook, you have already seen the Onion’s coverage of Iowa Fashion Week. Weirdly, the woman originally in the foreground of the photo—whom so many of us thought we vaguely recognized—has been edited out. You can see the missing lady at right, albeit in weird thumbnail form. Who was she? Why is she no longer the star model of facetious Iowa fashion week? Was she only a beautiful dream? No—we have her picture, as I mentioned earlier. Still kind of dreamlike.

Thus we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. Arthur Schopenhauer said that, possibly because he was a perspicacious genius and possibly because he was sad. He sure didn’t say it to encourage thousands of people to donate money to his megachurch, unlike his imagined interlocutor Joel Osteen. Which book sounds more like an honest account of the author’s beliefs: The World as Will and Representation or Become a Better You?  Trick question—whether an argument eloquently insists it is better never to have been born or that thinking highly of yourself will make you rich has no bearing on its validity. It’s not supposed to, anyway.

We all know that the arguer is more important than the argument, though. Some people have built whole careers out of knowing their audiences will disagree with them before they even open their mouths. On a related note, Alan Colmes has straw falling out of his pockets. Jonathan Chait’s analysis of an argument between Colmes and Bill O’Reilly on Fox News stands as a mini-essay on discourse as entertainment in 2013. Colmes has a fact that satisfies O’Reilly’s demand. O’Reilly has yelling and disdain. Guess who wins? Fox News is biased, which is why I get all my news from The Krugman Times.

And now, by popular demand, more drank rap. Okay, it’s not drank rap, but it’s genius:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2AHvZWojSc

Catch me on Maury with my bitch, indeed.

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