Wading herself into the culture wars, she defends a professor accused of sexual misconduct and fired, though an investigation acquitted him. She asks, “Why are accountability and transparency framed as against women’s rights?”
There is also a talk about learning to write using Tarot cards.
Some of the most memorable things in “Burning Questions” are just stray comments that work their way into your mind. She writes: “When I first saw the term” child molester in a newspaper I thought it said child molestera job available to children in which they would be paid for collecting moles.”
She writes about an early job in market research. She was skeptical of Pop-Tarts, “those breakfast biscuits made of two layers of flour product glued together like clamshells, with a dollop of jam in the clam position,” because they (initially) kept exploding in the toaster.
There is an excellently insane essay entitled “Cat’s Robo-Cradle,” in which she posits a moral way of eliminating feral cats that decimate the bird population. She envisions robotic coyotes that will swallow the cats and take them to a locked carnival, where they can live out the rest of their lives with squeaky catnip toys.
(A sidebar: This reminded me of a friend’s experience. This friend is broke and unemployed and starting to lose his temper; he’s starting to feel haggard. He’s ready, he thinks, to be a gerobo-coyote.
When Mormon missionaries knocked on the door recently, he said he would repent on the spot if they gave him “the full package.” His visitors were perplexed. The full package, he explained — an apartment in Salt Lake City and a well-paying job, ideally in the book business. The Mormons raced off on their bicycles, leaving dust behind.
No closed fair for him.)
Christopher Hitchens wrote that he needed a rectal thermometer to see how quickly he became an old hand. Atwood, at 82, looks barely ossified. She shines on the cover of this book, and the best pieces here also cast a certain sheen.
As for the speeches, I suppose during those speeches, like at any conference, you can sneak out onto the sidewalk for an illegal vape.