According to the Rate My Professors.com entries over the last two years on former New Yorker writer and Ken Starr scourge Renata Adler:

How many profs have wikipedia entries longer than most congressmen's? [...] Tells great stories, assigns great lit. Hot for goin on 70

By far the most interesting professor I've ever had. Today she told us that a scene from Woody Allen's "Manhatten" is taken from a conversation she had with Woody. That's crazy!

Renata Adler is a super cool person- so intelligent and interesting and crazy, but she's also an awful teacher. But, her antecdotes about working at the New Yorker and The New York Times (plus the A's she gave everyone in the class) was well worth my time

Totally skatterbrained, never stays on topic, i did no work at all for this class, class is a 80 min free association.

Almay Ad (Reproduced in John Berger's Ways of Seeing, 1977)

"The oral-sex craze—and in particular girls' insistence that blowjobs 'aren't sex'—has often been blamed on Bill Clinton and his semantic calisthenics during the Kenneth Starr investigation. But even if teen girls were looking to the White House for personal guidance, was it really Bubba they were trying to emulate? Girls' private lives are always much more influenced by First Daughters, or even First Ladies, than they are by any pasty politico." - Are You There God? It's Me, Monica, by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic, January 2006. [via Powells]

"Pardon the following intimacy, but performing oral sex has a lot to do with the unequal distribution of pleasure and power. It's more satisfying for the recipient than for the bestower. Without love or emotional connection, it usually makes the bestower an instrument of the recipient's will." - AGAINST "SUCKS", by Lee Siegel, TNR.com, April 28, 2006.

"There is another thinkable reason why this ancient form of lovemaking lost its association with the dubious and the low and became an American handshake and ideal. The United States is par excellence the country of beautiful dentistry. As one who was stretched on the grim rack of British 'National Health' practice, with its gray-and-yellow fangs, its steely-wire 'braces,' its dark and crumbly fillings, and its shriveled and bleeding gums, I can remember barely daring to smile when I first set foot in the New World. Whereas when any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth, lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent tongue." - As American as Apple Pie, by Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, July 2006.

There's no way left to swing it, so a troupe of eager musical theater folk have determined...to sing it. Monica! The Musical first appeared last spring. Now, a refined (errr, make that "updated") version, which premiered last night, has already sold out four of six shows at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. As your devoted Politicker slave, I went to see for myself.

Set against the slapstick backdrop, Monica dreams of someday being "Monica Rodham Clinton." "Now don't cry," Bill tells her, off in a corner at the inaugural ball."You're breaking my heart. And you're being very loud."

"Eat you later" was the valediction.