The winter holidays have arrived in America. Let us take stock:

The weather, here in New York and across the east coast, is very warm. The shootings in America continue. Refugee crises across the world are ongoing. Hunger and want ravages people across lands otherwise overflowing with resources. Derogatory comments are regularly stated by top US Presidential candidates in speeches and utterances aimed to bolster their campaigns. The environment is collapsing to a point, as of this December, that whole nations have become engulfed. War threatens, again, to take over the Middle East and the wider world.

And then, tucked into my mailbox, comes the New York Magazine Holiday Gift Guide, 2015. This is a guide rife and full, busting at the seams, with sequined-this and festooned-that: a thousand ways to look the other way. To spend your money elsewhere. To distract yourself and those you love for one minute, five, maybe ten. For the duration of a whole sock, a fine pork cut. A season. A year. It is the un-guide’s guide. It is no guide at all.

Of course– to be clear– we all love a little diversion from time to time. And yet, whatever you were thinking #NYMag, you have lent yourself to one fine and nasty, down and dirty, dramatic reading. So I read you below, word for word, in the tradition of the very finest dramatic readings.

https://soundcloud.com/user-525019282/ny-mag-gift-guide-2015