This is Kurt Vonnegut’s commencement address to the MIT’s graduating class of 1997, which was never addressed to the MIT graduating class of 1997 and never authored in any way by Kurt Vonnegut. Mary Schmich’s satirical bit for the Chicago Tribune is remarkable not for being one of the most prominent mass hoaxes of the early Internet. Not even for nailing the Vonnegut down to the comma (the viral hoax is evidence Mary did an epic job of it). It strikes me for two reasons. First, for being (surreptitiously) cognizant of so many life-altering things young men and women are often ignorant of. Second, for the subtle differences in detail between Mary’s work and a hypothetical equivalent written by a man (including Kurt himself). Differences in both substance and presentation. I will not break this down line by line because it has to be interesting in order to be good teaching. Instead, I will focus on something from my personal experience, which ought to give a cue to the men and women amongst you, including my Russian bot followers. (It won’t help much if you are a dining table or a hovercraft.) There are two huge challenges with the book I’m writing at the moment. One is that it is a “program” book: it must break your brain so bad that you be able to write back on it anything you want despite your earlier assumptions. The second – and much greater challenge – is that I want the book to accomplish this in equal measure with both men and women. For the second reason, I put even more effort than before into grasping how women experience the world and how the world experiences them. One longtime observation of mine, which has become especially acute lately, is how oblivious young … Continue reading The Feminine “Mystique” of Kurt Vonnegut the Yoga Teacher