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?

So, according to New York magazine, a local woman has quit her job and, with her husband earning a “low-six-figure income,” she has decided to raise children and not work at all! What an amazing specimen. But this isn’t your grandparents’ housewifery. “This is not the retreat from high-pressure workplaces of a previous generation but rather a more active awakening to the virtues of the way things used to be,” claims New York magazine, discussing how said lady rubs her husband’s feet when he comes home. (“Active awakening”! I’m really stuck on that language. I think it says that on a package of live yeast in my refrigerator? Also: there should be some mention of how the workplace has actually retreated from us, in the form of the radical instability of employment now, but perhaps I’ll leave my Marxist claptrap aside here.) In any event, I’m not sure I can question her choices. “HAVING IT ALL,” I have learned in the course of having had it all myself for some time now, often means doing a really bad job at everything.

But really? I’m glad more parents are staying at home instead of working. Every single person (by “single” I mean unmarried!) knows that on average—not in the specific, not in every case, but in the aggregate!—that they may be tasked with pulling the weight for certain kinds of employees. It goes like this pretty much:

• Smokers. • Parents (particularly of two or more children). • The Jews. • Marrieds. • People who work at home.

In which editors and writers reveal many secrets!

Budapest had never been my favorite European capital, but a job in a foreign city is always better than a job wherever I happen to be living at the moment. This is why, on a balmy Southern California morning in February of 1996, I voluntarily carried my only possessions to Los Angeles International Airport’s Tom Bradley terminal the customary three hours prior to departure. The first two hours passed pleasantly at the airport lounge, where my friend Steve and I drank double Greyhounds served in pint glasses.

The Double Greyhound is just a lot of vodka with grapefruit juice to soften the blow. We had been drinking these regularly in El Segundo, the LAX-adjacent working-class town noted for its sewage treatment plants and oil refineries. El Segundo means “The Second,” and the name comes not from California’s Old Spanish past, but from Standard Oil, which built its second West Coast refinery on farmland between Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach. Steve lived in a battered apartment complex with abandoned cars in the parking lot and an unobstructed view of Los Angeles International Airport. The noise was astounding. Each takeoff and landing made the windows rattle as beer bottles and drinking glasses walked themselves off the countertop and shattered on the yellowed vinyl flooring. It was so close to the airport that I had moved in for a week or two before my flight to Hungary, just to make sure I didn’t miss the plane. The successful budget traveler always plans ahead.

“Most of my buyers are averaging four offers before they have one accepted,” my new real estate agent in the Bay Area said yesterday. “It can be an emotional and stressful time.”

Probably! And especially if you’re moving from a still-depressed housing market, which is roughly the area between the Eastern Seaboard and San Francisco. But, as NPR is reporting as I type these words, the American housing market (in the coastal elite cities) is “fast changing.” From causing the collapse of the Earth’s economy just five years ago to a breezy NPR feature about an insane couple putting in offers at 2 a.m. after driving by a new listing, at night, the simple matter of having a place continues to cause misery, heartbreak and insomnia for those who would like to not deal with landlords and $5,000 monthly rents.

When the radio man says that “historically low interest rates are driving the recovery of the housing market”—a quote I just invented that you can probably hear, word for word, on Bloomberg right now—what he’s really saying is that rents are going crazy because enough people have money again to drive up the rents, but 3.4% annually on a half-million-dollar home means a monthly payment of about $1,800, after the 20% down payment of $100,000 (plus closing costs) you somehow have in the bank. Bring up your monthly house payment to $2,400 to include property taxes and homeowner’s insurance, and it’s still less than a three-bedroom place in a city with an economy. Especially if you need a patch of dirt outside for your dog to poop on.

Wild Nature Institute is the nonprofit creation of wildlife biologist Monica Bond and quantitative ecologist Derek Lee. They live and work for much of the year in Africa, where they study and inventory iconic and threatened wildlife populations such as the Masai Giraffe, which is rapidly declining due to lost habitat, disease and illegal hunting.

Ken Layne: Hello, Derek Lee! Because you are traveling between Nairobi and Zanzibar and I’m on the other side of the planet, maybe we’ll do this in email format? So what is it that you and Monica do in Africa? This past week sounds like it held a lot of safari travel and adventure.

Derek Lee: We are extremely fortunate to live and work in Tanzania, which undeniably has the best wildlife experience on Earth. Nowhere matches the incredible diversity combined with the extremely high density of mammals and birds found in northwest Tanzania. And there’s still the full suite of predators and scavengers indicating a relatively intact food web. The area also holds some of the last remnants of our planet’s pleistocene megafauna—elephant, rhino and giraffe. But it isn’t as glamorous and exciting as the typical romantic stereotypes of safari.

Safari just means “travel” in Swahili, and travel doesn’t always go smoothly, particularly when you are driving remote dirt tracks in Africa in a 20-year-old Land Cruiser and camping rough in the Bush. Our typical workday of surveying starts before dawn so we can eat and break camp to start surveying at first light. Animals are more active early in the day, so we have to be ready by 6:30 a.m. Then we spend the next 12 hours bouncing over what we euphemistically refer to as “roads” but are often just vague tracks across the savanna through washed-out areas, swamps, or places where the road has otherwise disappeared.

We look for ungulates—animals with hooves—and when we find some we count and record their distance from us, using a laser rangefinder; that’s so we can use statistics to correct our counts because as you can imagine animals are less likely to be seen when they are far from the “road.” When we see giraffes, we drive off-road to get close enough for a good picture of their right side. Photos of the giraffes’ unique fur markings go through pattern recognition software to identify individuals and track their births, deaths and movements. This is where we usually get stuck. It can be mud or sand or a huge hole dug by elephants or aardvarks, but eventually while off-loading we get stuck, and then have to spend hours getting unstuck. There are no tow trucks in Tanzania and you can wait days or weeks before any other vehicles or tractors come by, so we have to be prepared to rescue ourselves.

Perhaps the most feminine of all feminine products to have ever existed on Earth is Love’s Baby Soft. Its packaging, all soft curves and pale pink and frost, was basically an homage to the tampon. Its marketing scheme was Cinemaxilly soft-focus pre-teen beauty queen. It was made out of chemicals. It smelled like babies.

From the mid-70s until the mid-90s, this fragrance was an object of intense feminine fetishization for girls who had reached a certain age: the one at which we began to feel, rather definitively, not quite like little girls, not yet like teenagers. At this age, around 11 or 12, we acquire a sense that there’s a next level somewhere out there, just out of view, as if we are characters in a video game. We are consumed with figuring out how to get there. A magic mushroom must be consumed, a brick wall must be smashed through, certain totems must be collected. These, conveniently, are available at CVS: lip gloss, mascara tubes, curling irons, concealer sticks, Tampax—pretty much anything that comes in pink and is shaped like… a wand. After all, the symbolic language of little-girlhood still speaks to us.

The first in a series about our teenage fragrance memories.

In this sense, Baby Soft was pure parfumerie-marketing genius. It is an aroma that touches the comfortable memory place inhabited by scented Cabbage Patch dolls and, um, actual baby powder. It is positioned reachably, at a price-point just around allowance-level. And, in its confusing way, what it says is: WOMANHOOD.

It is once again time for the NCAA “March Madness” basketball tournament. The eventual champions will get to bask in the national spotlight until the next cruise-ship disaster/shark attack/episode of “Girls”/baseball season/ happens. And sure, winning a basketball title is worth bragging about; but we all know the real champion is the institution of higher education that can charge the most tuition and still have enough students to keep its rejection letter printer warm. It’s The Awl’s annual NCAA bracket by tuition, using the college information resource Peterson’s.* (Where available, in-state tuition was used.)

A spot about a father suffering from Alzheimer’s is the most popular of a new series of ads that has young people on China’s social networks talking—or better put, it has them talking about crying. “Every time I see it I cry,” writes one Weibo user. Hers is a typical reaction. Filial piety might seem a laughable topic for a public-service campaign in the west, but in China, it’s the basis for a campaign aimed to guilt kids into thinking about the elderly. Making China’s youth cry is not enough, though; China needs the new generation to act on that guilt, to buy into the Confucian ideal that has long served as the country’s social safety net.

The only problem is that China is also asking them to buy everything else.

It runs 24 hours a day—a rarity, anywhere in the world—and it moves 1.6 billion riders a year across the five boroughs of New York City. And on Friday, it will become more expensive. After a fare hike five years ago, the base fare of taking the subway (that is with no discounts) will rise a quarter to $2.50 a pop. And although some of the service cuts enacted in 2010 have since been restored, this hike is not attached to any improvements in service—alas. As with other mandated fare hikes, this one was met with a resigned outrage, a sense that, boy, wouldn’t it be great if there was not going to be a hike even though we’re powerless to stop it?

This is a natural opportunity to ask the question, as we have concerning other elements of getting from one place to another in the big city: taking inflation into account, does it cost more today to take the subway that it has historically, or are we just a bunch of bellyachers?