Now who should come along to screw it up but James Franco, whose short-story collection, "Palo Alto," comes with an author pic so ridiculously dreamy, so full-lipped and chin-carved and chestnut-haired that I'm already wondering how I can scan it into my next book jacket. "Yes," I imagine responding to e-mail queries. "That's exactly what I look like. Which is why I don't do public appearances anymore. The fans get so damn grabby."

Envy, then, is a prime consideration in confronting Franco the Writer. It's not enough that he should be Salon's Sexiest Man Living of 2009. Or an artist with a solo exhibition in Tribeca. Or an extremely well-compensated and (when occasion demands) competent movie actor. Nooo, James Franco is now making a play for the New York Times Book Review and the monthly Book Sense list and the Barnes & Noble 100 and all those places where homely, unsocialized men and women once held sway.

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Any more than I'll be watching, in the weeks to come, "Let Me In" (severely bullied boy seeks help from a neighboring vampire girl) or "Case 39" (12-year-old girl's parents try repeatedly to murder her, to the point of stuffing her in an oven). Or putting "Kick-Ass" on my Netflix list or, except under great duress, escorting my kids to the latest Harry Potter movie. And my reasons have nothing to do with esthetic principles, of which I have few. It's just that, after 10 years of parenthood, I have become ridiculously, intractably, humiliatingly averse to seeing children in peril.

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Which is to say that, somehow, amid the interstices of skin- and hair-care commercials and NBC fall-show previews (repeated as insistently as Buddhist chants) and distance-learning courses in hair styling (from chief sponsor Farouk Systems) and running spigots of advertorials for Las Vegas attractions (Sushisamba! Minus 5!), the high solemnities of the 2010 Miss Universe competition were prosecuted efficiently and relentlessly and, yes, joylessly.

Do you remember when beauty pageants were entertainment? A hoot and a holler and a half? Gay men crowded around the TV set with their boy and girl pals and laughed at all those fire jugglers and hula dancers and rhythmic gymnasts and all the glib horrors that came tumbling from their cherry-red mouths, and look, there WAS Bert Parks dragging his ponderous ass down the Atlantic City runway, and we could laugh because it was our game, too. We were in on it, living in the same gap between aspiration and reality.

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As you might expect from the director who brought us Odorama and Divine eating dog shit, these role models are a raffish lot: lesbian stripper moms, foul-mouthed barmaids, pornographers, perverts. Not to mention the occasional cult celebrity (including "Monster Mash" singer Bobby "Boris" Pickett and former child actress Patty McCormack, star of "The Bad Seed"). Loitering as always on the edges, Waters finds inspiration where others see squalor and makes provocative points about art and morality and the good life — without losing an ounce of his ironical cheer.

Salon spoke with Waters in Washington, D.C.

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And, for the last three years, I have been swallowing my Lexapro -- and everything that comes along with it. And, apparently, I'm not alone.

Between 1996 and 2005, the number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled. According to the Centers for Disease Control, antidepressants are now the most commonly prescribed class of drugs in the U.S. -- ahead of drugs for cholesterol, blood pressure and asthma. Of the 2.4 billion drugs prescribed in 2005, 118 million were for depression. Whether the pills go by the name of Lexapro or Effexor or Prozac or Wellbutrin, we're downing them, to the tune of $9.6 billion a year, and we're doing it for a very good and simple reason. They're supposed to be making us better.

Which leaves a quite massive shoe waiting to drop. What if these costly, widely marketed, bewitchingly commonplace drugs really aren't fixing our brains?

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Speaker 2: "I fell in love with him ... I truly believed that we were going to do great things, and he was my ticket to the top ... I became his sole confidant."

Given the crush of recent news coverage, you won't have any problem believing the first speaker is John Edwards. Your task now is to figure out the second speaker, who is also the person to whom he directed the aforementioned remarks. Is it:

A) Soon-to-be-ex-wife Elizabeth?

B) Mother of most recent child Rielle?

C) Disgraced ex-aide Andrew?

As anyone who sat through last night's "20/20" soft-pornathon can attest, the answer could very well have been A or B, but it is in fact C.

And maybe that's everything that need be said about the quasi-erotic and not-so-quasi-erotic ties that bind political leaders to the young men who champion them and sacrifice their egos for them and work 16 hours a day for them, and even their example pales alongside that of Andrew Young, who pretended to be the father of his boss's mistress's child despite already being the married dad of three kids. And who, to keep that deceit alive, actually dragged his family across the country with the mistress in tow and paparazzi snapping at their asses the whole way.

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And in that case, let's pause and pay due homage to a movie that many of us either missed or overlooked the first time around. A television movie, of all things, that through some convergence of inspired casting, rich production values, and deep but unfussy textual fidelity became the definitive version of a beloved literary classic.

Only we're just now figuring that out.

When you ask ardent Dickensians to name the best version of "A Christmas Carol," they will invariably close ranks around the 1951 Alastair Sim adaptation. I was one of those partisans myself. I turned up my nose at Reginald Owen and Albert Finney, I scoffed at Michael Caine and Patrick Stewart, I rolled my eyes at the mere mention of Bill Murray and Kelsey Grammer, I resisted even the myopic charms of Mr. Magoo. It was Sim or nobody.

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Here’s a question. Would any court in the land deny this wife restitution? And in the court of public opinion, would anyone take the side of a husband so stingy and unfeeling?

Let us now switch the husband’s gender. He is now a she: a lesbian tennis star willing to use the legal system to extract herself from another unhappy relationship. This makes the case more complicated, to be sure, but it does nothing to alter the injustice. And, if anything, the outrage should be greater.

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Townsend didn't live long enough to witness the ascent of über-consultant Malcolm Gladwell, who walks off with considerably more than a watch: $40,000 a speech, by most accounts, and an annual income in the neighborhood of $1 million. Buoyed by two runaway bestsellers, "Blink" and "The Tipping Point," Gladwell has positioned himself as a roving ambassador between cultural and corporate America, penetrating boardrooms and living rooms, providing bullet points for cocktail parties and management seminars, and changing not just the things we talk about but the way we talk about them.

But in this new era of belt-tightening, everyone must expect some cost-benefit analysis, and so, in our best consultant-speak, we ask: How much value does Malcolm Gladwell really add?

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Oh, screw it: A quarter-century after its birth, "Scarface" lives on, for all its vulgarity. Or is it because of its vulgarity? "There is something unshakably low-down and seedy," writes Tucker, "disreputable and sneaky, about 'Scarface' as a piece of art, an antistatus that only adds to its pervasiveness and longevity."

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At least Dennis Haysbert seems to think so. Months ago, he declared that his portrayal of a black president on Fox's "24" series had paved the way for the real-life senator from Illinois. "If anything, my portrayal of David Palmer, I think, may have helped open the eyes of the American people. And I mean the American people from across the board -- from the poorest to the richest, every color and creed, every religious base -- to prove the possibility there could be an African-American president, a female president, any type of president that puts the people first."

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To put numbers on it: As of 2004, U.S. citizens were carrying, on average, 14 percent more debt than income; as of last month, the U.S. government owed China something on the order of $1.3 trillion; as of, well, now, the total amount of our national debt is more than $10 trillion. So maybe the time has come, as Atwood suggests, to examine "debt as a human construct ... that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force."

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Four years ago, Democrats made a lot of noise about Canada, but as political statements go, there's not much sting to "I'm so mad at America I'm going to move a few degrees of latitude northward." Tina Fey has suggested we leave Earth altogether, but at the risk of reviving a discredited rubric, I'd like to propose a "third way." Actually, I'll let sociologist Phil Zuckerman propose it. In "Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment," he tells of a magical land where life expectancy is high and infant mortality low, where wealth is spread and genders live in equity, where happy, fish-fed citizens score high in every quality-of-life index: economic competitiveness, healthcare, environmental protection, lack of corruption, educational investment, technological literacy ... well, you get the idea.

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Last month, Philip Roth's novella, "Indignation," created a WASP bastion named Winesburg College in your honor. This month, you're a flesh-and-blood fictional character. In the opening pages of "The Wettest County in the World," you've come to southwestern Virginia to revive a flagging career. Old protégés like Hemingway and Faulkner have turned on you; your dreams of starting a "rustic literary salon" have come to naught; the two local newspapers you're editing have sucked away your life force; and you live in the shadow of a "nameless terror … some great thing, swaying, descending."

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If you believe any of those propositions, you are ... well, let's tack toward charity. You have been swept along in a tide that the British polemicist Damian Thompson likes to call "Counterknowledge." Moreover, you are legion. Millions of unwary souls from every quadrant of Earth are swallowing a daily diet of quackery, conspiracy theory, bogus history and faux science. We haven't just turned off our bullshit detectors, we've permanently disabled them. And in so doing, Thompson argues, we've made for ourselves "a thrilling universe in which Atlantis is buried underneath the Antarctic, the Ark of the Covenant is hidden in Ethiopia, aliens have manipulated our DNA, and there was once a civilization on Mars."

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Voltaire did at least have one thing in common with the clerics he loathed: He had been shocked into the contemplation of suffering. And it doesn't necessarily require an earthquake. For essayist Peter Trachtenberg, it was simply the experience of watching his friend Linda succumb to autoimmune disease and cancer. "She was good in all the ways I wasn't," he writes in his searching and often searing "The Book of Calamities." "She was temperate and loyal; she loved her family. She was good to me. It's quite likely that I owed her my life, though in all the years I knew her, she never reminded me of my debt to her."

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Traditionally, this rite of passage is understood to be both necessary and necessarily brief. Growing up in the early years of the 20th century, for instance, a young painter like Han van Meegeren was expected to mimic the old masters as closely as possible, but only so that he could absorb their accomplishments and, one day, surpass them. What van Meegeren eventually realized -- to his chagrin, probably -- was that he was a much better artist when painting as someone else. So began one of the most audacious careers in the annals of art fraud, a journey superbly etched by Jonathan Lopez in his absorbing history "The Man Who Made Vermeers." Taken together with Lee Israel's eccentric affidavit-memoir, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" the book raises provocative questions about the links between authenticity and art. Is the "true" better than the "false"? Can art ever spring from a lie?

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That three-word introduction in the pilot episode nicely spells out the Ian-Fleming-on-the-range conception behind "The Wild Wild West." The show -- which ran on CBS from 1965 to 1969 -- melded the then declining western form to the ascendant spy thriller, and then added some buddy-movie dynamics, a healthy dose of political intrigue and generous helpings of science fiction. The result was ... well, a mess sometimes, to judge from the DVD release of the show's fourth and final season. But at its best -- which is to say, in its earlier seasons -- "The Wild Wild West" stands as one of the most intriguing and literate actioners of '60s TV.

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Diligent, linear-minded readers will have to ford through 370 pages of his alternately incisive and gauzy book, "The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism," to reach the accusation that has set the nation's blogs abuzz. In September 2003, according to Suskind, CIA officials -- at the direct command of then-CIA director George Tenet and at the behest of the White House -- deliberately forged a backdated letter from Iraqi security chief Tahir Jalil Habbush to Saddam Hussein. The phony letter claimed that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had trained for his mission in Iraq and that al-Qaida had facilitated mysterious shipments from Niger to Iraq. The letter was the "slam dunk" the Bush administration had been seeking so desperately: evidence of a direct operational link between al-Qaida and Saddam's regime.

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