• In Impotence: A Cultural History, Angus McLaren, and leave it to a scholar named Angus, found a 17th century French midwife with a suggestion: “An enchanted husband should drink water from the mouth of a ‘young stone horse.’” (To be performed, apparently, while the horse himself is drinking.) My new favorite euphemism for horny and limp is now “enchanted,” but better yet: try “due benevolence” for sex. In the same study, “Nicholas Culpeper and midwife Jane Sharp recommended that a man, who due to magic could not give his wife ‘due benevolence,’ should piss through her wedding ring.” That can’t be good for the ring. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal was a huge influence on J.K Rowling and was the inspiration for many spells and Professor Flitwick. No word if he looked like Warwick Davis. Or if anyone had to piss through a ring to stop Voldemort. Maybe Voldemort’s whole narrative was impotence? Scholars, start your engines.

What else vexes you?

• 91 Hangover Cures

• Acne Cures Through The Ages

• Hideous Birth Control Methods Through The Ages

• Hemlock, for Men! So, in 19th century England some doctors recommended eating Hemlock. I guess that the idea was if you were impotent you were too embarrassed to live. Take it from The British Journal of Homeopathy.

• But impotence isn’t just for men. In The Origins of Life and the Process of Reproduction in Plants and Animals, Frederick Hollick tells us that small vaginas are the cause of female impotence and “the vagina can be enlarged or open in the female, and the only cause of impotence in her can be removed.” So there you have it. Small vaginas are the only problem ladies have. No need for a billion dollar medical industry, or for health insurance. No word on what they used to enlarge the vagina.

Serial entrepreneur millionaire Jason Calacanis is joining the crowd of rich people in turning against college: “In my estimation college is worth it if you have a ton of money and don’t care about ROI, or if you can pay less than $50k-$75k and get a job with starting pay of $50k or more (generally technical, trade or finance work).” Don’t go to school, kids!

But there’s an answer. And the answer comes from brave disruptors in tech! That’s where all good answers come from. “They’re blowing up education by making it a) free, b) on demand and c) engaging—and even fun!” Yessir. “Did you know you can take tons of courses from MIT, Stanford and Harvard online right now for free?”

When editors and sponsors demanded changes to his copy, the legendary absurdist comedian and radio star Fred Allen used to reply: “Where were you bastards when the pages were blank?”

This joke is about the common misconception about what really happens between writers and editors, which is a kind of alchemical collaboration, provided that the collaborators in question are in sympathy and closely attending to the matter at hand. Granted, that doesn’t happen every time, on either side, but at its best there is no hostility, and no jockeying for an advantage in this symbiosis: no ego, no performance, just an intent shared focus on making something good together for the reader’s benefit. A finished piece of writing made in this way will transmit a certain quality often called “polish,” but which might more accurately be described as “camaraderie.”

Harold Ross, the great editor of the New Yorker, wrote on this topic to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in 1945:

The only great argument I have against writers, generally speaking, is that many of them deny the function of an editor, and I claim editors are important. For one thing, an editor is a good trial horse; the writer can use him to see if a story and its various elements register as he or she thinks they register. An author is very likely to suffer a loss of viewpoint (due to nearness to the subject) before he gets through with a story and finish up with something more or less out of focus.

This was in a letter to a writer, obviously, and I don’t know the context in which it was written. Maybe Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings had a swelled head (she wrote a number of short stories for the New Yorker in the early 40s, beginning only not long after she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction), and Ross was trying to get her to play ball. But many, many writers, beginner and seasoned pro alike, are in a total panic about suffering the very “loss of viewpoint” Ross describes. There is nothing that can soothe such terrors like the calm and reasonable words of an editor, a professional reader, the wise and honest friend who has the wherewithal and the desire to perfect your work, and apprehend any fugitive viewpoint. The writer who doesn’t understand that a good editor’s interests are entirely aligned with his own is a big idiot, and I leave him, with all the pity in the world, to all his entirely unnecessary sufferings.

Since 2002, Jason Ross (@jasonjross on Twitter) has been a writer for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” where his team has won a half-dozen Emmy Awards for outstanding writing and produced the best-selling America: The Book and Earth: The Book.

Jason Ross: Here I am.

Ken Layne: Hello, sir! I’m in the middle of the greatest consumer survey in human history.

Jason: That is a fairly low bar to clear.

Ken: Disneyland is building Star Wars Land. This will make Disneyland much more tolerable for me:

Which of the following Star Wars locations would you be especially interested in visiting at the Disneyland Resort? Please select all that apply. Move your mouse over each to view location.

Jason: OK. That’s worth moving a mouse over each location for…

Ken: Anyway, there’s a lot of talk these days about “writing for free” and whether that’s a new paradigm of exploitation and etc., and I thought we could talk about that in the context of becoming a professional comedy writer. But first, we must introduce you!

Jason: Should I … ? OK. My name is Jason Ross and I am a writer for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Is that … ?

Ken: Shoe size. They can figure out the rest from “shoe size.” No, that is fine. Now, you were produced by the same excellent environment that produces Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, is that right?

What is the current market value of a Nobel Prize? Until yesterday, that question would have been virtually impossible to answer, which proved to be advantageous to the family of Francis Crick. Heritage Auctions, the entity that conducted the sale of Crick’s 23-carat gold medal in New York this week, declared it a “historic moment.”

As such, bidding started at $250,000.

1 Niels Bohr offered his own Nobel Prize to benefit the Finland Relief in 1940. It was purchased by an anonymous bidder who donated it to the Frederiksborg Museum. Son Aage Niels Bohr, a nuclear physicist, also won the prize. The younger Bohr died in 2009, and whoever inherited his medal sold it at auction just last November, for €37,500. The bidder wished to stay anonymous, and the fate of the medal is unknown.

In a wonderfully dramatic—but woefully inaccurate—statement on their website, Heritage declared that it was “the first time in 70 years that a Nobel Prize has been sold at public auction.”1 A handful of medals have indeed been sold, but almost all by, and in order to fund, charitable institutions.

Crick heirs, however, are splitting the lion’s share of the $2.27-million final bid amongst themselves. The family has promised 20 percent to the Crick Institute in London, a medical research institute slated to open in 2015.

Francis’ descendants placed the majority of the Nobel laureate’s legacy on sale this week. Their timing was impeccable, but far from serendipitous. According to granddaughter Kindra Crick, the family planned the auction to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Francis’ discovery of the double helix of deoxyribonucleic acid. In layman’s terms, he co-discovered the structure of DNA, considered the most significant advancement in the biological sciences since Darwin’s theory of evolution.2

The Crick family’s offerings were breathlessly reported by nearly every major news outlet, from the Wall Street Journal to MSNBC, but journalists seemed curiously unwilling to cast a critical eye. Hardly a sound was made about the allocation of profits, the timing—or the original intent of the Laureate himself.

Last February, an iteration of the Olive Garden restaurant chain opened in Grand Forks, North Dakota. “The place is impressive,” Marilyn Hagerty wrote in her curiously favorable review for the Grand Forks Herald. “The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day. The portion was generous.” Hagerty’s review consisted almost entirely of declarative statements of fact about the restaurant’s décor, the size of its menu’s portions, and practical background info intended for prospective diners. Reactions to Hagerty’s subdued encomium ran the gamut of cosmopolitan condescension: from delight in her earnest sincerity to heartfelt pity.

Then in November, Pete Wells, restaurant critic for the New York Times, reviewed Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, a 500-seat vasty hangar of a Times Square mess hall and the 11th restaurant opened by Food Network personality Guy Fieri. Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar was spun off from Fieri’s TV show “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.” The program features Fieri visiting unpretentious joints beloved by locals all over the nation and sampling the idiosyncratic fare in situ. The Food Network markets Guy’s televised road trip as a kind of roving celebration of vernacular American foodways. Wells’ review of the restaurant thusly inspired consisted of forty-six questions directed at Fieri: “Have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square?” Wells asked. “Did it live up to your expectations?” “When you cruise around the country for your show, rasping out slangy odes to the unfancy places where American like to get down and greasy, do you really mean it?”

In honor of Opening Day on Sunday, the first of two essays today on the history of the game.

It’s almost impossible to think of baseball without thinking of money. There’s no better example than headline-grabbing Alex Rodriguez, third baseman for the New York Yankees. In 2000, he signed an alarming ten-year deal with the Texas Rangers for $252 million (which the Yankees traded for in 2004). This is the deal he opted out of during (like, in the middle of) Game Four of the 2007 World Series, only to sign another ten-year deal with the Yankees, this time for $275 million. Now, with Opening Day days away, the oft-injured (and not-oft-loved) Rodriguez stands to make $28 million for the 2013 season.

Not only is baseball the dream-catcher of American nostalgia and the obsession of math nerds everywhere (why, would we even have a Nate Silver without baseball?), it’s the first American sport to become a professional sport, a big-time, nationwide business concern. So as we have done in the past with the Super Bowl and movie stars), let’s engage in the other American Pastime, talking about how much money other people make.

American Student Loan Debt Delinquencies has overtaken American Credit Card Debt for the first time on the spectrum of Debts. Students pay more to go to college and graduate school and get less from their buck than ever before. And now you can’t even pay it back! You used to get a job, now you get a ham sandwich, maybe. It’s not necessarily the fault of colleges and universities. They have to make big bucks to keep all that marble buffed and ivy trimmed. I’d much rather blame the heads of departments. The myth was once that if you got a Liberal Arts education in some worthless degree field you’d still be able to get a job in some worthwhile career field later. It would just be like a joke you told at staff Christmas parties: “Doug, tell us again how you majored in Beatnik Studies at the University of Lipstick on Allen Ginsberg’s Ass!”

Unless you’re currently in school studying Oil Sands or Fracking, you’re in the wrong growth industry. Journalism will be taken over by the bots in the next few years. If there’s an app that has an algorithm that can summarize long articles into a paragraph, it’s only a matter of time before they have one that can take a tweet and make it into a longread. You know, dipping into Wikipedia, grabbing a few facts here and there from all over the web. Kinda like what real journalists do. Except real journalists will be living in their mother’s basements. And that’s just for the most useful kind of writers! Imagine being a creative writer!

$91,500 for a t-shirt? Yes. It finally happened.

Congratulations to us, and to the Hermès men’s store on Madison Avenue for just hanging it quietly on a shelf with some rather more normal clothes. (I mean, expensive clothes! But everything looks cheap next to this price tag.)