The Rake Magazine

Year: 2002

  • Hat Head

    It’s silly to suggest that American men stopped wearing their hats just because JFK took his off during his 1960 inaugural address. In fact, he wore a silk top hat that whole day—and tails! Some people claim that he actually revived this tradition; Truman wore a topper for his inaugural, but Eisenhower wore a homburg. And both men—especially Ike—went around bareheaded all the time. I guess you could make the argument that they weren’t as young and handsome as JFK, and thus had less influence. Still, the hat was undoubtedly already in decline, as the 50s gave way to the more permissive 60s. It’s always been interesting to me that this myth persists. It’s obviously more about glorifying the memory and the martyrdom of JFK than it is about explaining why men just don’t wear hats anymore. And show me the Minnesotan who insists on going hatless through the winter, and I’ll show you a moron with frostbitten ears.

    Noel Sims, Cambridge

  • Dear Mary

    I enjoyed the beautiful pictures of the Blessed Virgin Mary [“Something About Mary, Mother of God,” December]. However, the accompanying article is very offensive to me in a few places. Being that I was raised a Catholic, I want to know the source for stating that Mary is a “figure of adoration.” I’ve always been taught that only God is to be adored.

    Stella Lundquist, St. Paul

    Jeannine Ouellette claims increased interest in Mary has caused the Church more trouble trying to manage her image, meaning, and legacy. It’s been a problematic, unnecessary, and equivocal sore spot with modernist Catholic theologians, catechists, and in various liberal Catholic circles. This has been especially true in U.S. parishes, colleges, and seminaries since the Second Vatican Council in 1962-1965. Soon after Vatican II, many priests—tacitly approved of by their bishops, and despite the protests of their own congregations—willfully spawned their own iconoclasm in churches, convents, and seminaries. Yet while these misinformed Catholic “experts” were trying to take Mary from her pedestal and lock her in the closet, pockets of Catholics—especially conservative and traditionalist groups—never would or could let Mary “die.” Just as the traditional Latin mass never disappeared depite serious opposition from many bishops and priests, Marian devotions not only survived but thrived, even in parishes where modernism took a powerful hold during the 60s and 70s. There are more churches celebrating the Tridentine Latin Mass today than there were in 1975. Maybe, just maybe, the renewed interest in Mary, especially among secular and Protestant groups, is simply a fad. (A few years ago there was apparently an interest in “angels.”) In those circles, perhaps the “cult of Mary” will stick. I’m not betting on it.

    Howard A. McQuitter, Minneapolis

  • The Rake Bites

    I’m a fan of The Rake, but do you just toss that award-winning attention to detail and critical thinking to the wind when you write about anything concerning animals? In December, you (1) profiled Horst [“The Fine Art of Living Well”] without mentioning a top Aveda selling point—their refusal to test their cosmetics on animals, (2) extolled the virtues of hat-wearing [“Put a Lid On It”], and reminisced for beaver-donning days without mention of the fact that this little fashion trend nearly extinguished Minnesota’s furry buck-toothed population and (3) detailed Katie Quirk’s transformation from vegetarian to butterburger lover [“Minnesota Fats”]. Now, don’t get me wrong, Quirk is a fantastic writer, but shouldn’t something as common as “Former Idealist Returns to Hamburger” be left to The Onion? In November, you published “Oh, fer cute! Ouch!” and offered a glimpse into the hip pocket-pet trend of the year, sugar gliders—from a pet dealer’s perspective. To balance this out, I sent the article to Nick Mooney, a wildlife professional in the gliders’ native Tanzania. It turns out that the cute little animal whom Dan Gilchrist describes as “desperately trying to get out of your hands” is probably “stressed and not happy about being handled,” says Mooney. And even when the glider seems mellow and content—Gilchrist describes owners who put the marsupials in their shirt pockets “while they watch TV or work on the computer”—they’re really freaking out, according to Mooney. Gliders, he says, “curl up and withdraw as a response to stress.” Mooney wrote, “All in all I’m appalled to see our wonderful marsupials become ‘pocket pets’ with little or no dignity, a likely sticky end with no benefit whatsoever to sugar gliders.” Want more? Mooney was also concerned about the impact on individual gliders and the local environment should they escape and compete with hollow-nesting birds and animals, and the temptation to declaw the claw-needing critters. Mooney was curious to know whether welfare legislation protects such unconventional pets. Concerns for animal and environmental welfare have prompted many states and municipalities to make ownership of the marsupials illegal. According to the online store K & D Exotic Pets, sugar gliders are illegal or restricted in nine states (not yet including Minnesota) as well as many municipalities. Keep up the good work, Rake editors. But maybe you could leave the critters be.

    Sue Rich, North Minneapolis

  • Filling in the Blank

    Just a short note to let you know you failed to write about the amalgams in most of your readers’ teeth [“Grin and Bear It,” December]. Yes, I know that my health is better without the mercury in my body. Jesse Ventura was the first governor to appoint a mercury-free advocate to the Minnesota Dental Board—Ron King, D.D.S.

    Leland Roth, Spring Park

  • I Adore-A Your Fedora!

    Eric Dregni should be congratulated on his new fedora [“Put a Lid on It,” December]. I think he’s right, too, in locating the decline of the fedora (and the homburg) from about the time of JFK’s inauguration. I think lower car headroom played a part. I remember my father always wore a hat, and so when I got my first real job in 1958, I bought a brown fedora because that’s what you wore when you were grown up. Trouble is, I never could bring myself to wear it, and it ended up on a Guy (a Guy Fawkes Day dummy) 20 years later. Then a few years ago I read Billy Collins’ wonderful poem “The Death of the Hat” which begins “Once every man wore a hat. / In the ashen newsreels, / the avenues of cities / are broad rivers / flowing with hats.” So, I too wanted a fedora. Because I could not find any in Minneapolis, I got a brown one from Lock & Co. in London. Unlike Eric Dregni, I have met only with compliments. “Wonderful hat!” from a Marshall Field’s salesperson. “Great hat!” from a man on Sixth Street. Headwaiters’ eyes gleam when I enter a restaurant (they never did before). I owe it all to my fedora. Fedoras are back.

    George Soule, Northfield

  • Boys Will Be Boys

    I recently spent a sad evening in a basement in South Minneapolis. An acquaintance was seeking subsidised legal advice about the custody of his children. He had found it pretty difficult uncovering a voluntary agency able to offer advice to men on such matters. But now here he was with six other unfortunates waiting his turn and talking about his experiences.

    The stories we heard seemed to suggest that there are areas of Minnesota life where inequality of the sexes has been turned on its head. One wife’s lawyer had apparently suggested a baseless accusation of domestic abuse simply to get the husband out of the house. Other men’s accounts left a similar impression of helplessness, which the legal clinic was striving, with limited resources, to redress. Perhaps it was useful to just get together and commiserate with the boys.

    Male friendship is a sensitive plant, growing most strongly when supported by the trelliswork of such institutions as the bowling league, the English pub, or the backstreet tea-house of a Near Eastern town, where mustachioed men sit low to the ground on stools made of old tires and play tric-trac by the hour. I remember a Persian friend once asking me why Americans, such effusive folk when you meet them, spend their evenings shut away each in his home. There certainly do seem to be a lot of lonely men around, and those in this basement, separated from their families, seemed especially bereft.

    According to popular belief, the frail flower of American male friendship is often watered by beer—and in the case of most American beer, watered is certainly the word. Thanks to advertising, Budweiser is not only the most popular brew in America, it is increasingly chic abroad. To each his own. But for me, Bud brings to mind the old pub adage that “you only rent your beer.” It is therefore a pleasure to recommend a good solid brew that has a taste.
    The August Schell company of New Ulm is one of the oldest breweries in the country and one of the oldest businesses in the state. It was established even before the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, by immigrants from the Black Forest. The German tradition at New Ulm is obvious. The city boasts a statue of Hermann the German (Arminius to you, me, and Tacitus), whose destruction of three Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest in 9 A.D. prevented the expansion of the Roman Empire into Germanic lands. (Professor Peter Wells of the U of M will soon be publishing a splendid new book on this battle.)

    The German pedigree is a fine omen (though I suppose Schlitz, Schmidt, and Blatz are respectable German names, too). Of the numerous admirable brews produced by Schell’s, the one which pleases me most bears not the name of the company but the city. Ulmer Braun has a gold label with a rutting buck who is either ecstatic or angry—has he just consumed the contents? Or trodden on a broken bottle, inconsiderately disposed of? The beer is a pleasing dark brown, the color of old mahogany, and at less than a dollar a bottle for the six-pack, is extremely affordable. You can taste the hops and malt. If you prefer not to taste your beer, you can chill it in the American style, I suppose.

    Ulmer Braun is not so stout as Guinness. Nor is it so muscular as Porter, a beer originally made for the men who carted around the crates of fruit and vegetables at Covent Garden Market in London. (Summit Brewing Company makes a fine Porter for those who really like to get their teeth into their beer.) Ulmer Braun has more heart than most lagers. It is a comforting beverage to have with a pork chop and potatoes on a bitter January evening.

  • Cabbage Roles

    It was a very snowy January when I ran away to Prague. The family I stayed with lived in one of a cluster of monolithic stone apartment buildings on the outskirts of the city. The grey air outside the buildings smelled of coal and smog, and the air inside smelled of tea and cabbage. Each night after I returned from exploring the city, I would stop by the market to buy the beer for the evening, my contribution to the dinner. And each night I would be surprised by the ingenuity and creativity of the meal, which somehow had to contain cabbage. The Czech couple and their three-year-old daughter Dereska happily cleaned their plate night after night, as did I, with the help of a few Pilsner Urquells.

    Cabbage and I, as is the case with most Americans, had not had a loving history. I rather disdained the vegetable for my memories of its bitterness and stinkiness. My first meal of boiled cabbage in their tiny, cramped apartment was choked down with a smile. The next night greeted me with cabbage soup, which proved tolerable. The following week was headlined by turkey and cabbage hash, potato and cabbage pancakes, and cream of cabbage soup and ham. During dinner the family spoke honestly about their economic struggles and their hopes for the future of their country, and sitting in the kitchen which was also laundry room and living room, I realized that they had never taken anything for granted, ever. Maybe it was this new insight or perhaps a simple wearing down of the taste buds, but cabbage had a new place of honor in my life. From then on, cabbage’s starring role in our meals seemed to signify stability. Lenka admitted to me that she often got tired of it, but for her family, the vegetable was cheap, healthy, abundantly available, and versatile. For me it became the flavor of strength and character.

    Because it is so easy to grow in so many areas, cabbage has come to be known as commoner’s food, hardly the kind of thing that would show up on an epicurean’s table. Those with a love of cabbage understand that when prepared right, the subtle textures and flavors complement the richest dishes. When prepared with a bevy of different techniques such as stir-frying, steaming, braising, blanching, and sautéing, this Cinderella of vegetables deserves a night at the ball.

    Many Americans may remember cabbage from the kitchens of their immigrant parents as they boiled the hell out of it, producing a smell that could ward off the Bolsheviks. Or maybe they remember their parents forcing them to eat it, not letting them leave the table (a la Joan Crawford) until their plates were clean. These parents—like my Czech friends—remembered a time when nothing could be taken for granted. But somewhere along the way, the first-generation children rebelled. Instead of learning to cook, they ordered take-out. Instead of forcing their own kids to eat something that was good for them, they went to the drive-through.

    Have we sacrificed fortitude for ease? Have we given up on character? Do we necessarily have to eat stinky vegetables in order to gain it back? Happily, as Lin Yutang said, “Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.”

    First of all, let’s be frank: Cabbage can be nasty. When you cook cabbage, especially when you boil it, the mustard oils and isothiocynates break down to form stinky compounds, including hydrogen sulfide, otherwise known as “that rotten egg smell.” The bigger insult is that the longer the cabbage cooks, the more smelly the compounds become, actually doubling in intensity between the fifth and seventh minutes of boiling.

    One of the best ways to deal with cabbage is the way it has been prepared over thousands of years, through the process of fermentation. As far back as ancient China, there have been people preserving their cabbage in salt and vinegar. Documentation shows the builders of the Great Wall supplementing their rice diets with cabbage fermented in wine. This tradition took hold in nearby Korea, where today kimchi is the national condiment. Popular enough to be immortalized as a sassy cartoon figure, kimchi consists of fermented cabbage and other vegetables including spicy variations of red pepper powder, garlic, ginger, green onions, and radishes. Spiritually as well as culturally, this cabbage dish is special. Any variation of kimchi will always follow the Korean cosmology—a strict set of symbolic correspondences known as the Five Colors and the Five Flavors.

    Genghis Khan is widely credited with bringing the fermented cabbage to Europe, where it was adopted by the Teutonic tribes. There, it was named sauerkraut, or “sour herb.” The Germans and Dutch thought so highly of it that they stocked all sea-going vessels with it, thereby curing the scurvy that had previously plagued their sailors. (Cabbage—and thus sauerkraut—is a very rich source of vitamin C; red cabbage has about twice as much as green.)

    The Russians consider cabbage to be their national food. With cabbage dishes that can be incorporated into meals at all times of day, the Russians eat seven times the amount North Americans do. They believe their Schi (cabbage soups, including borscht) strengthen the sight and help chronic cough, and cabbage leaves wrapped around the head will relieve headache.

    Yet for many, the pickling and flavoring can do nothing to hide the reputation of cabbage. Perhaps this will help: Instead of thinking of it as a stinky, lowly food, think of it as an ancient fortifier of armies. It feeds nations fighting for freedom. Living its noble life close to the ground, cabbage doesn’t need frilly vines or explosively bright flowers; it bears down and keeps out of the way. Change may take baby steps, so a good way to start is by steaming some of the beautiful leaves and seasoning with caraway and celery seeds, or dill, mustard, oregano, or tarragon. Once the warm virtue of cabbage seeps into your soul, you might find yourself delightfully force-feeding it to the loved ones around you.

  • Nuke World Order

    After the Coke bottle, the most enduring icon of the 20th century might be the mushroom cloud. Unlocking the secrets of the atom is science’s crowning achievement, equating matter with energy, and discovering a cheap and limitless source of power. On the other hand, it represents the all-too-possible destruction of life as we know it on Planet Earth. Needless to say, there are some issues to be worked out here. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, artists have been hard at work trying to make sense of the paradox. And as we all know, the end of the Cold War certainly didn’t moot the process. If anything, the specter of “rogue states” developing nuclear capabilities is much scarier than anything during the Soviet era—at least if you believe the rhetoric these days. Two events this month look at different sides of the nuclear question: Park Square Theater’s staging of the play Copenhagen, opening January 8, and Oak Street Cinema’s film and lecture series “Radioactive Reels,” running Tuesdays through January.

    Copenhagen, Michael Frayn’s Tony-winning drama about the earliest days of the nuclear age, is a cerebral snapshot of a real-life meeting in October 1941 between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish mentor Niels Bohr.

    It was the height of the Nazi regime, and the two men were politically opposed, though still friendly. Whatever Heisenberg came to discuss shattered that friendship, and may even have kept the Nazis from winning World War Two. (Heisenberg’s miscalculation of how much uranium was needed is cited as a major reason the Nazis didn’t develop such a weapon.) What really happened? The simplest explanation is that Heisenberg merely wanted scientific advice, and that Bohr, a Jew, broke off their relationship when he realized his former student wanted to give Hitler nuclear weapons. But there are other possibilities, many suggested by Heisenberg himself after the war.

    In the play, Heisenberg claims he wanted to know whether the Americans were trying to build a bomb, so he’d know whether Germany should put the enormous resources required into its own effort. In real life, Heisenberg went even further, claiming in 1956 that his intention was to get Bohr to work with him in actively suppressing A-bomb projects by either side. That statement prompted Bohr to write an angry letter with the accusation that “under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons.” It was never sent, and only released by the Bohr family after Copenhagen’s success.

    Heisenberg stuck to his claims, but historians discounted them until the 1993 publication of the so-called “Farm Hall transcripts,” which prompted the writing of Copenhagen. British spies secretly recorded Heisenberg’s conversations with other German scientists while they were prisoners of war. In the transcripts, Heisenberg seems to suggest that he deliberately delayed the German bomb project. Was that a moral choice, or a convenient revision of his past to better fit the post-Nazi world? Or even a white lie to salvage his pride at failing where the Americans had succeeded?

    It’s a murky historical question befitting the man most famous for formulating the Uncertainty Principle. Frayn makes the most of that metaphor, framing the moral questions of the play in terms of quantum physics. You don’t need a complete grasp of the science to understand the ethical issues, but Frayn takes admirable care to explain as much as he can in layman’s terms. Just as Heisenberg showed that the act of observing an object is inevitably obscured by the act of observation itself, Copenhagen suggests that truth is never completely knowable because of the lies we tell, both to ourselves and others.

    The place of nuclear power in popular culture has also been, in its way, constantly shifting, and governed by our growing understanding of its dangers, our willingness (or lack of it) to face the issue, and our vacillating confidence in the powers that be.

    In the years immediately after Hiroshima, nuclear energy was treated as a miracle of science, with an almost charming naiveté—we were supposed to take the futurists seriously when they predicted atom-powered toasters. Still, the destructive potential of atom-splitting was never too far off in the wings, psychologically speaking. In the fantastic plots of pulp fiction, nuclear power took over as the primary device to explain an otherwise outlandish plot, just as electricity had animated Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s 1816 novel. In popular films of the 50s, the horrible effects of radiation were exaggerated, spawning gigantic monsters in movies like Them! and Godzilla—simultaneously acknowledging our fears and putting them in a form ludicrous enough to handle. (These days, radioactivity’s mantle as a great source of monstrous mutation has been commandeered by genetics-meddling, as the most recent incarnation of Spider-Man will tell you.)

    Soon enough, and thanks to the increasingly frigid Cold War, nukes were depicted almost entirely in nightmare terms. In addition to the monster movies, the early 60s spawned a number of earnest Cold War thrillers like Henry Fonda’s Fail-Safe, a nightmare scenario in which the U.S. accidentally nukes Moscow, prompting the president to deliberately sacrifice New York to prevent full-scale nuclear war. The reigning champion of Armageddon satire, 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, had the same artistic aim despite the addition of a brilliant sense of humor.

    But then even the satirical impulse dried up. Some writers have claimed that the Cuban Missile Crisis was so unsettling that the American public would no longer accept stories overtly depicting nuclear destruction, and there may be some truth to that—for 15 years after Strangelove, the most high-profile nuclear-themed films were the mostly ridiculous Planet of the Apes movies.

    Realism in nuke movies didn’t make a comeback until the socially conscious 1970s, most strikingly with 1979’s The China Syndrome, a harrowing thriller about a catastrophic near-meltdown at a nuclear power plant. By some cosmic coincidence, it debuted just a few days before the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, the catastrophic near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The ensuing psychic jolt stuck in the national consciousness for a long time. The number of nuclear-themed novels and movies rose steadily through the 1980s, probably influenced by Reagan-era nuclear proliferation and Chernobyl in 1986. More importantly, there was a noticeable shift in tone. The children of China Syndrome—The Day After, Testament, Threads—dared to depict the post-Apocalyptic nuclear winter with terrifying realism. And, mirroring the growth of the punk movement, science fiction became much more nihilistic. The mutant monster of the 50s always had its vulnerabilities, a scourge that could be permanently defeated. But by the time of The Terminator, WarGames, and Silkwood, even the popcorn thrillers acknowledged that nuclear war meant total destruction. The only mystery that remained—as it has always remained—was just how we were going to figure our way out of this dilemma. Having split the atom once, are we ever going to be sure the chain reaction has stopped?

  • Life in a Northern Town

    It’s the world’s largest freshwater port. But when the steel, timber, and frozen pizza industries go to hell, the city is screwed. Or maybe not. How did our favorite northern town go from being “the state’s largest white ghetto” to being its most popular destination? It’s all about converting to the post-industrial future that awaits us all—the global tourist economy.


    Today, the quintessential symbol of Duluth may not be the raw beauty and power of Lake Superior, or even the beloved Aerial Lift Bridge, but instead the rather humble rust-colored ore boat afloat on Superior’s waters in the lift bridge’s shadow. The SS William A. Irvin is a retired 610-foot ore boat that sailed for U.S. Steel from 1938 to 1978, carrying iron ore and coal to Great Lakes ports. In 1986 the Irvin became a tourist attraction in the Duluth harbor, and is now visited by thousands of people every year.

    The Irvin has become a figurehead of Duluth’s waterfront, but it could also be called a figurehead of Duluth’s successful conversion from a swarthy industrial port town to a diversified economy with a heavy emphasis on tourist dollars. “We’re both a tourist attraction and a working city,” says Ken Bueheler, executive director of the Lake Superior Railroad Museum at the downtown depot. “I think most people get that now. We are both.”

    In order to fully appreciate the significance of the Irvin’s perennially fresh paint and long lines during the high season, you have to understand how much likelier it once seemed that any retired ore boat docked in the Duluth harbor would have rusted itself away to oblivion right along with the blighted economy and waning population of a dying city.

    Back in the summer of 1974, my mother was packing my sisters and me and the family dog into the old Impala for the move from Duluth to the wild west. My dad and his sister were simultaneously dumping my great aunt’s North Shore log home (with stone fireplace on a wooded lot near the Lester River) for a paltry $15,000. They were glad to be rid of it. And around that same time—an era of scarring economic hardship for the hilly city—another fed up Duluthian was paying for the installation of a billboard that begged: “Will the last person to leave Duluth please turn out the lights?” That dismal billboard might have been my final view of the city, as the Aerial Bridge and the gritty Duluth-Superior harbor disappeared behind the rising southbound slope of Interstate 35 at the Cody Street exit.

    As a West End girl, my view of Duluth was necessarily impoverished. But my mother’s weekly drives along London Road to “look at the mansions” made it clear even to a child that somewhere along the line there had been real wealth in Duluth. In the late 1800s, when the timber, steel, shipping, and railroad industries that put Duluth on the map were in their full glory, Duluth boasted the highest concentration of millionaires per capita of any city in the country. The 1970s and 80s, however, saw brutal setbacks in the steel, mining, and timber industries, and as the economy bottomed out, Duluth’s high school graduates flocked away en masse and thrust the population into deep decline.

    In recent years, though, the city has been transforming itself. A tedious battle over the expansion of I-35 through downtown finally gave way to a successful freeway expansion that included the use of surplus funds to re-brick the downtown streets and build a boardwalk along the shore. These days, the dozens of new hotels, resorts, restaurants, and shops—and of course the William A. Irvin—in Canal Park and along the North Shore suggest that people really love to stay in Duluth.

    And yet the city’s latest tourist attraction—the Duluth Aquarium—ran into trouble within a year of opening its doors, and is still scrambling to concoct a viable plan for reopening in the spring. Some wonder: Is this snow-belt city of ore boats, paper mills, and arctic weather really sustainable as a tourist town?

  • Wired for Success?

    I suppose I’d be a better writer if I could hold my liquor. After all, plenty of U.S. winners of the Nobel Prize for literature—from Sinclair Lewis to William Faulkner to Eugene O’Neill to Ernest Hemingway—were friendly with the bottle. Liquor as a literary lubricant dates back to the authors of the U.S. Constitution. According to Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, the U.S. National Constitution Center discovered material in 1992 that drives the point home: “One document that survived is the booze bill for the celebration party thrown two days before the U.S. Constitution was signed on Sept. 17, 1787. According to the bill, the 55 people at the party drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight bottles of whisky, 22 bottles of port, eight bottles of cider, 12 bottles of beer and seven large bowls of alcoholic punch.”

    This is terrifically bad news for lightweights with a penchant for the pen. Try as I might, I just can’t get my writing gene and my drinking gene properly connected. When I’m hemmed in by deadlines, a glass of wine takes the edge off just enough to scoot me from the keyboard to the couch. A second or third glass starts me into a frenzied bout of chatting and a spark of sexiness that ends abruptly with sudden-onset narcolepsy. Sorry to say, I’m a much better writer (and a livelier date) on the single-drink plan.
    Truth is, since I’m rather chronically underslept, my greatest hope of high achievement may lie not in rum but in Ritalin. It seems the controversial attention deficit drug is now being used by college students who want to stay awake for finals and research papers.

    A study of Ritalin abuse on campus, by Dr. Eric Heiligenstein at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that one out of every five students he interviewed had used Ritalin or similar drugs without being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder—the typical reason people are prescribed the hefty stimulant.

    Whatever happened to No-Doz? Or even coffee? They’ve been bested, it seems. Ritalin is said to have the power not only to keep you awake, but to increase your concentration and focus, as well.

    Student.com reports that a single Ritalin pill commonly sells in the dorms for $5 to $10. If the aim is to get high and forget about the finals, then illegal users may crush it into a powder and snort it, or smoke it, or even mix it with a liquid and inject it.

    Not surprisingly, the effects of Ritalin on students without attention disorders have not been evaluated (particularly in its crushed and injected forms). But good old common sense is sufficient to suggest that anything in the wrong quantity or combination can be dangerous—or deadly.

    Overall abuse of prescription drugs is an increasingly common problem for college and high-school students across the country, and federal drug officials say Ritalin is among the top controlled prescription drugs reported stolen in the United States.

    The fact is that the United States consumes 90 percent of the world’s Ritalin, and production of Ritalin is up 700 percent since 1990. An estimated 6 million American youngsters take Ritalin or another drug for ADHD. Ten to 12 percent of all boys between the ages of 6 and 14 in the United States have been diagnosed as having ADD.

    Now, none of this means that the next burning trend will be Ritalin abuse among writers with low tolerance for alcohol, but then again, who would have predicted Ritalin for toddlers? Even those in the very middle of the Ritalin debate were disturbed by a recent Journal of the American Medical Association article showing the number of Ritalin prescriptions were exploding for toddlers as young as two, for alleged ADHD.

    Ritalin for toddlers can only underscore the central question of exactly how much activity, distractibility, and impulsivity constitutes a “disorder” in children under five, or children in general. Show me a two-year-old without “ADHD symptoms” and I’ll predict she’s asleep.

    Just like me after two glasses of wine. Which leads me to believe that perhaps it’s not Ritalin we all need, but more naps. Granted, frequent napping is not, as far as I know, a trait widely shared by my literary heroes, but nevertheless I’m happy to test the theory myself… just as soon as I get myself another cup of coffee and polish off my deadlines.