I’m Mad As Hell And I’m Not Going To Parent Anymore

So, I just got done reading the Findings column over at Harper’s Magazine, which is written by my good friend, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, who is perhaps the best dressed copy editor on the east coast. Most of Rafil’s musings in the column relate to the doings of highly trained kung fu monkeys, the handsome quotient of NFL quarterbacks, and other scientific findings of no use, factual basis, or relevance to anyone other than those who find these sorts of things amusing. He did have one line that I had to consider closely: “people with children are more prone than the childless to feeling angry.” Now, as an employee of Harper‘s, I am well aware of all the effort that goes into producing the Findings each month. It’s fact-checked, copy-edited, goes through several drafts, all of that fancy journalism stuff. But the only thing that finding left me with was this response: duh.

Below, lifted from the Harper‘s art archive, are some illustrated examples of how the glaringly obvious truth quoted above actually looks:

Uncle or Friend of the Family
Uncle or Friend of the Family
Father
Father

I write this column from the white hot fury of my father-dom.

Published by Theodore

Theodore Ross is an editor of Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, Saveur, Tin House, the Mississippi Review, and (of course), the Vietnam News. He grew up in New York City by way of Gulfport, MS, and as a teen played the evil Nazi, Toht, in Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. He lives with his son, J.P. in Brooklyn, and is currently working on a book about Crypto-Jews.

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