What did you think? What sentences jumped out at you? What questions stuck with you? (Starts on p. 167 of the new collection of David Foster Wallace's essays, Both Flesh and Not.)

I want to start every sentence I write, "But and so" (have read IJ, which has a number of variations on this phrase.

"In fact, AIDS's gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there's nothing casual about sex at all. This is a gift because human sexuality's power and meaning increase with our recognition of its seriousness. This has been what's 'bad' about casual sex from the beginning: sex is never bad, but it's also never casual." (171)

Interesting alternative look at AIDS.

"There's a new dragon to face. But facing a dragon doesn't mean swaggering up to it unarmed and insulting its mom." (171 pb)DFW can be laugh-out-loud *funny* while he is being serious.

"And sexual passions' endured for millennia as a vital psychic force in human life—not *despite* impediments but *because* of them." (169pb) Hence much fiction and film-making.

Is anyone else noticing how DFW is using—or not using—commas? I like his choices.

I liked this piece in places, but it felt more tossed-off than the others…more like the big claims weren't quite fully-formed. As I read it, I found myself wondering where it had been printed. A little digging revealed that it was published in Might Magazine: en.wikipedia.org in 1996 as "Impediments to Passion." Might Magazine was a Dave Eggers creation that went out of business in 1997; the story of Might is one of the threads in Eggers's first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It's amazing to me how all of these histories collide.

Patricia—good catch on the commas! Apparently, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience" (as it was first titled when it ran in the NYTimes Magazine) "contains possibly the only use in Times Magazine history of the serial comma."

newyorker.com