The Illuminated Donkey

It might seem like a crazy thing to say in a month where I not only read Wigfield but also tonight saw the illustrious cast read selections from it at Symphony Space (a performance which I believe was recorded to be eventually broadcast as part of WNYC's "Selected Shorts" program, so keep an ear out for that), but the funniest thing I've read in weeks might just be the parenthetical sentence from the following passage in the New Yorker's May 12 profile of Karl Rove..

[Karl] Rove was an autodidact intellectual, and often talked about books. According to Edgeworth, he once told Rove about the dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), and Rove called him a few days later and said — this was memorable because Rove does not readily admit that somebody else knows something important that he didn't know already — "You know that tripartite deal? Where'd you find that?" (Rove disputes this account, saying that he wrote an elementary-school paper on dialectical materialism and so did not need to be enlightened by Edgeworth.)

Ah yes, who among us will ever forget having to skip Little League practice write that fourth-grade term paper on dialectical materialism. Those were truly the salad days...